Reading these patents, it's just a description of usenet through a web interface. 

Dejanews was doing this before the patent was registered. Google bought Dejanews and changed it into Google Groups. 

The only 'addition' is that the patent allows one to add information to existing information according to an authorization scheme, thus an implementation of access control lists. NNTP server implementations do a rough version of this (you're authorized or not), although it wouldn't surprise me if something akin to this was already present in Dejanews (you're authorized to post in some groups and not other (moderated) groups). Didn't Netscape's NNTP server add this to the existing NNTP code?

Shifting capital to the legal business, that's all this is about. 

Lies, damn lies and laywers