They added to the body of knowledge and didn't bitch when someone else quoted them. And they definately did get quoted.

There are certain expectations of privacy established through custom. I'm not talking about the "right to republish" here. Copyright law covers that.

I'm talking about courtesy and decency. While a newspaper reporter probably has a right to republish something he overheard in a pub, chances are that his editor would require a fact-finding mission first to verify the truth of what was said before publishing it, especially if it was embarassing or damaging.

We have certain privacy expecations in society. Yes, legally, there appears to be no difference between the CB and a node. I'm not interested in arguing this along that axis. I'm just talking about expectations.

I expect that my CB chat will be transitory, viewed by the audience that I expect is there (as seen by a glance to "other users") and then disappear into the ether. So I treat it like I would a pub-style conversation, where I get loose sometimes and don't always think about my facts or opinions... I'm just chatting, I can fix it back up in a minute or two if someone disagrees.

On the other hand, I expect that a node is more permanent (like a Usenet message or a column I write), so I think carefully about what I write, make sure it'll make sense in the context presented, and usually reserve opinion and controversy unless I'm responding to something I strongly disagree with. In other words, I write what I expect will be quoted and my name attached to it.

Some people here (perhaps you) are requesting me to change my expectation about the CB (pub to me), to presume that there's not only the temporal attendees, but a microphone connected to a loudspeaker outside the building. I'm sorry, but if that were to happen to me explicitly in a pub, I'd probably stop talking. And if it happened to me implicitly in a pub, I'd raise bloody hell as I did here, because it violates what I consider to be the scope of my audience.

So that's why I feel violated when the transcript was quoted. I thought I was talking in a pub, and someone published a pub chat in a newspaper. Further, I thought we had already agreed not to do that, but as I've seen now, that's not the case.

I'm glad we're getting a chance to discuss it now. What I'd like to see is a resolution (soon) that codifies the expectation. Either:

1. We agree that CB is transitory (like a pub), and agree not to publicly log it (or get permission before reposting a log), or
2. We agree that there is no difference between a node and the CB, and that conventional quoting rules apply, or
3. We agree to something else.

So can we get this resolved soon? Leaving it ambiguous as it appears to be now really doesn't work for me.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker