-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Friday, Sergio Brandano ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote:
> We are talking about written words, carrying the name of the author. > These written words are being archived, indexed and re-published. > The legal owner of copyrighted material (as any author is, unless a > legal transfer has occurred) is the only legally-entitled distributor > of any such material. By subscribing to a mailing list, a person is > pretty far from transfering the copyrights of any posted material. > Mailing lists (non-commercial, as Debian is) are in fact a forum of > friends. Archiving, indexing and allowing re-publication of this > material by other sites is now going *well beyond* the mere posting > of an email to a list of friends. Except that the lists for which archives are available are *public* mailing lists. Now, I don't know you, yet I'm reading your postings now. I have copies of these postings in my personal archives, and they will probably stay there for a very long time, and I'm sure others will do the same. Equally, I could provide a web interface to my archives of these public mailing lists, and AltaVista, et al, could then index those. Anybody on any of the public lists who was suitably inclined could do the same. In fact, if you type my name into Google, the first eight pages or so of matches are my past postings to mailing lists. My point is this; are you going to attempt to contact everybody who has archives containing mail from you posted to public mailing lists, and ask them to remove older postings, or prevent them from being indexed? If the mailing lists were closed-subscription, and subsequently had archives published, I could see where you were coming from, but they're open lists, and as far as I know, always have been, and the fact that archives could or would be published is something that you took on board when posting, implicitly or otherwise. I'm pretty sure it's not explicitly stated that this MAY happen to your postings when you subscribe to a list, but the very fact that the archives are there, common sense, and nettiquette would suggest that it's fairly likely. There's also the issue as to whether open-subscription mailing lists are considered public fora as most USENET newsgroups are. I'm pretty sure they are. Apologies if this sounded like a bit of a rant, but I know that if I stand in the middle of Trafalgar Square and shout, I've got little right to request whoever tape-records or transcribes what I'm shouting doesn't publish it. Similarly, if I post the USENET, I expect it to be copied, archived and indexed. The same applies to public mailing lists. Part of the point of archives is that they keep track of old threads and messages, so that people *can* refer to them at any time. Whether they do or not, or in your opinion should have a reason to, doesn't play much of a part in it. I'm not having a go, just trying to (probably badly) put a few points across :) Mo. - -- Mo McKinlay [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://ekto.org Read http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1855.txt - ------------------------------------------------------------------------- GnuPG/PGP Key: pub 1024D/76A275F9 2000-07-22 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.0.4 (GNU/Linux) Comment: For info see http://www.gnupg.org iEYEARECAAYFAjr4UPcACgkQRcGgB3aidfn4QwCfeN0fFmpED2rgUW5WrY9+hCao gfgAnivFs17AWVJdTH2LS6Lp1jrqwMvX =VEWK -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----