A recent mass-extinction of news groups

I was shocked that some old standby news groups that I had been following for a decade have vanished. I was going to check to see if there were new posts on the alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.hornyrob and found it was gone. Over the years, I had been looking at pictures from there and then deleting them. Now, it is no more. Do you suppose that Color Climax is on a tear, enforcing their copyright, so the news providers dropped the group for fear of litigation? In any case, it is gone. There is apparently no such thing, anymore, called "fair use". The damnable DMCA seems to have blown it away. Soon, the UseNet will be reduced to amateur groups and spam. It is already largely spam, but some of it is moderately interesting, except for being repeated so often!