Although copyright law does allow the author to control the
publication of his/her own work, at what point do the demands of the
author exceed what is considered appropriate and polite behavior. By
sending email to the list, you have implicitly agreed that your posts
are not only allowed to be published in the forum, but to be archived
as well. Those are the stipulations of belonging to an archived email
list.
If we must protect ourselves legally, then we should place this simple
notification in the confirmation message for subscription requests:
"You are about to subscribe to a public, archived email
list. By confirming your subscription, you agree to
allow the Twin Cities Linux Users' Group (TCLUG) to
forward your posts to other list members and to the
web-accessible, public archive. Requests to remove
material from the archives will be reviewed by the list
moderators, but in most cases will be respectfully
declined."
When push comes to shove, however, I don't think we have a legal leg
to stand on. I don't recall if this has been tested in a court of
law. Given that this type of notice may not have been sent out in the
original subscription confirmation, it may be necessary to fulfill the
requests of the author in question.
A nice feature enhancement of mailing list software would be a user
configurable expiration of messages. i.e. No archive setting would
have an expiration of "0" days. No expiration would be "-1". This
would be difficult with the current way that archives are created, as
an "MBOX" email folder.
Anyway...
--
Chad Walstrom <chewie at wookimus.net> http://www.wookimus.net/
assert(expired(knowledge)); /* core dump */
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