Are Usenet fans vulnerable to lawsuits?

In a new series of lawsuits, Hollywood studios for the first time are targeting companies that provide access to Usenet newsgroups.

This corner of the Internet, largely a leftover from the days before the Web exploded into the mainstream, rarely gets much attention. It's still primarily a forum for text discussions (and overwhelming amounts of spam), where techies help one another with Windows and driver problems, and animal lovers share cat stories.

But in the last few years, a handful of technologies have emerged that have made newsgroups a much more fertile place for downloading copies of movies, music and software.

The MPAA says all the sites they've sued are facilitating piracy. But the legal status of search engines has never quite been clarified, and indeed, Google itself is the largest newsgroup search tool in existence.