Re: archiving on inet

[m5@vail.tivoli.com (Mike McNally)]

Jim Nitchals writes:
 > Let me argue against Usenet archiving on a different point.  Archiving
 > violates the poster's implicit right to cancel or provide an expiration
 > date for his posting.

"Implicit right to cancel"?  Where'd that come from?

 >         a potential employer may see a message written in anger or
 > the author was in an exceptionally bad state of mind...

There's a poem by Carl Sandburg with some relevance to this.  I don't
see why the feature of cancel messages (which aren't guaranteed to
work anyway) carries with it a new right.

 > I'm not a lawyer, but it *seems* to me that when you publish a message
 > from a set of newsgroups containing a 'control' group that allows
 > retraction of messages, you're agreeing to honor those retractions when
 > they're issued by the original poster.  

I am perfectly free to implement my own news system and mailer that
does not honor cancel messages.  What authority would force me to do
so if I don't want to?

 > when a message contains an expiration date, the author CLEARLY has a
 > reasonable expectation of having it honored.  

Why?  Does he have an equally clear right to expect that the message
does not get deleted before then?

 > I'd go further and say
 > there's a strongly implied agreement that says, "if you want to use
 > and republish this information, you must honor my expiration date."

This seems pretty specious to me.

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