Mailinglist privacy: MY NAME ALL OVER GOOGLE!

Bart Silverstrim bsilver at chrononomicon.com
Fri May 6 05:42:24 PDT 2005


On May 6, 2005, at 7:08 AM, Anthony Atkielski wrote:

> Fafa Hafiz Krantz writes:
>
>> What if ones life is at risk?
>
> As I've said, send a DMCA to the owner of the archive (and to other
> parties if they have copies).  If they don't take down the infringing
> material, you can sue.  If their ISPs don't cooperate, you can sue them
> as well.

Yup.  Sue the mailing list archive, sue the ISPs, sue the list 
members...after all, they could have saved the information in their 
email client.  Oh, and sue Google too.

Who do you sue if you write a letter to the editor of a newspaper, they 
publish it,  then you decide you want to take back what you wrote?

When you post to a public mailing list, there is no more expectation of 
privacy than you have walking down a public sidewalk.  You made the 
decision to make your words public.  Good luck taking them back, 
Sparky.

>> There should be a law protecting users against this.
>
> There is: copyright law.  But most technical geeks don't know much 
> about
> it, so they try to pretend that it doesn't exist.

Bull.  It's a very important issue for "geeks", especially with various 
open source factions starting to get into court disputes over 
licensing.  The ones who pretend there are no copyright laws are the 
people who pirate materials off the Internet, and the majority of them 
aren't "technical geeks".

Here's some info that seems to show that your archived messages are 
covered by copyright...but the archives are deemed FAIR USE:
**********
Licenses implied by circumstances.
Fair use is a legal license conferred by the statute. However, licenses 
may also be implied by context. Writers who post messages to public 
e-mail lists should contemplate, for example, both forwarding and 
archiving. It is reasonable to assume that they have given permission 
unless it is explicitly denied.

One Web site asserts that list owners have the right to approve the 
forwarding of e-mail from one list to another. Yet, barring a rule 
applicable to a particular list, I am aware of no legal basis for it. 
On the contrary, one would not expect members of most e-mail lists to 
object if their messages are forwarded to others likely to be 
interested.

Likewise, few who post to public lists would object to having their 
messages archived. Archiving clearly serves the interests of members 
who may occasionally want to revisit topics addressed earlier. Indeed, 
most would prefer that to seeing topics rehashed--the reason one often 
sees lists of frequently asked questions (FAQs) with answers.

Can writers revoke permission once granted, say for messages they later 
wish had not been sent? Circumstances that would warrant a revocation 
of an implied license are surely rare. Courts generally do not favor 
imposing unreasonable obligations on others. Because list owners cannot 
recall messages once distributed, authors should be careful what they 
post.

One more caveat is in order about implied licenses to use other's 
postings: If you forward a message or use part of one in responding, do 
not change the author's meaning. No one implies permission to attribute 
embarrassing (or worse) messages they did not write!
*********

The above was quoted from 
http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/05-01/field.html ...copyrighted by them, 
of course.

No one changed or altered the OP's information.  No one is trying to 
profit from it.  No one is claiming copyright on it.  It would appear 
to be fair use to archive or mirror the material!



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