“In 1985 I bought my first computer. I bought it to help in my insurance business. To tell the truth, I had no idea what to do with it. But everyone said it would help. So I laid out over $4,000 for a Tandy 1200, a straight XT type machine with a huge 10 Megabytes hard drive. I paid the extra money for the hard drive because I was told it would store everything I would ever need on one disk. I also went for the best color graphics--CGA in all it's glory… It was beautiful!”
Ultimately, this wasn’t about one couple’s run-in with the feds but a sign of things to come for other sysops. “Shareware is a legitimate threat to the software companies that sponsor the SPA,” Dvorak wrote. “There are about six huge BBSs in the U.S., and they all promote shareware. Rusty's reputation for having commercial software on the board for downloading made it the easy first-strike target in a long-term campaign to put shareware authors and small-time operators back into the underground, where they won't affect sales of the big boys.” “The SPA is doing a lot of damage to the reputation of BBSs through its coordinated witchhunts of late,” one Usenet poster wrote about the news in February 1993. “I've tried calling the folks at Rusty and Edie's all day to see if I can get their side of the story, but the board line just rings and rings, and the voice line has been constantly busy.” At the same time, the old guards of erotic media were playing catchup to the BBS systems administrators who were beating them to the web. Playboy.com launched in 1994, and the company prepped for its arrival on the web by seeking out and suing anyone posting scans of the magazine’s photographs online. The company had an employee on this task full-time, posing as a regular subscriber to access bulletin boards and check them for Playboy’s pictures. The Event Horizons BBS, started in 1983, began as a nerdy space game that grew into one of the most profitable BBSes in the world thanks to its expansion into softcore porn offerings; Playboy sued its operators in 1993, and settled out of court for half a million dollars. Playboy filed its complaint against Rusty n Edie’s in 1993, alleging copyright and trademark infringement. They settled in 1998. This was all happening before the Communications Decency Act of 1996, and Section 230 within, which might have protected Rusty and Edie from liability for what their users uploaded. Companies could sue small websites and platform operators out of existence for hosting user-generated content they didn’t like—including copyrighted content, but also libel and defamation. The feds could go after any operator disseminating “obscene” materials, as well, using local community standards of obscenity; in 1993, California couple Robert and Carleen Thomas, who ran the Amateur Action BBS (another of the most popular BBSes of the time) were targeted in a federal investigation after being accused of disseminating child sexual abuse materials. In the effort led by a Memphis assistant U.S. attorney, a postal inspector logged on, downloaded explicit images, ordered videotapes to be sent through the mail, and sent unsolicited child pornography to the BBS. In January 1994, the Thomases were indicted by a federal grand jury in Tennessee on 12 counts of violations of obscenity laws and one count of child pornography (but were later acquitted of that charge). Robert was sentenced to serve 37 in a federal penitentiary; Carleen got 30.Fear of being shut down by major publishers like Playboy over copyright infringement often led BBS sysops to some weird moderation decisions. Many were already checking every file uploaded to make sure no child sexual abuse imagery made its way onto their servers, and after Event Horizons’ and Rusty’s run-ins with Playboy, they started checking for potentially stolen or copyrighted material, too. This they did using varying rubrics and gut hunches—long before digital rights management software or automated moderation tools were invented to speed up the process.The operator of the Exec-PC BBS, which itself hosted a huge library of adult material, said in the late 90s that he took an “I know it when I see it” approach to spotting copyrighted content: “If the photos showed beautiful women that were so absolutely gorgeous and that the photography was so beautiful, and you know, there were no blemishes on their skin and the lighting was perfect, we just took it off.” As for Rusty’s fate, he tried cobbling the system back together and vowed it would return, and even set up a website on the World Wide Web. But Rusty n Edie’s never returned to its full glory. The couple remain local legends in their hometown, however; a sign at the R&E Centre shopping plaza in Boardman, Ohio, at the same address where they hosted the servers, still declares it the “Home of Rusty & Edie’s BBS.”“Rusty and Edie had made a lot of enemies in the BBS community because they had a reputation for reposting nudie .GIFs from other sources, removing the original promotional material and inserting their own promotion stuff—a practice despised by BBS operators. Many bulletin board services barely eke out a living and would be profitless if it weren’t for the peculiar demand for downloadable pictures of people in the buff. Rusty had also done little to make friends in the BBS community. It’s one of the few BBSs that do not even post the number of other BBSs for the convenience of subscribers. So when Rusty was busted, the community did and said nothing. Many operators quietly smirked or applauded. Yes indeed, the SPA picked a convenient target.”