In the first item, AOL is claiming a copyright for the *compilation* work that they are doing in selecting what things to put on their public areas. They are also telling their customers that they can only use such material for their private use. This essentially means that Joe Customer can't FTP AOL's public directories to his BBS and sell access for $5/month. AOL doesn't claim copyright for the contents of all the original text, just for the work involved in selecting and compiling the data (ie the manpower this costs them). You can still get permission from the original authors to use the original items (but not the collective compilation) in another way. The second item is for their protection. They're saying that if Joe Customer writes an essay and decides to post it in the public areas, AOL is free to redistribute it for free, and so on. That is the straightforward part - you can't have people sending AOL a bill for every usenet article they authored on the assumption that it made AOL so much more attractive to other customers :-) The part that may sound confusing is the one about third party work posted to the public area. It may sound like AOL is trying to assume the right to resell the material on your list. What they really mean is that they don't have the manpower or desire to review each and every posting as it is placed in the public area. So, if Joe Customer places something written by a third party (or coming from a mailing list) in their public area, Joe is implicitly warranting to AOL that there won't be any copyright problem. If this later turns out to be restricted material and someone sues AOL, AOL can in turn sue Joe to recover. I think you'll find that these are pretty standard service provider terms, at least assuming they only apply to the public areas. Like most legal documents they sound very fascist :-) Eric