Always, there are a bunch of people who stand around going "Nope. You can't do it." no matter what is suggested. You can just imagine what they would have said if they had been asked about setting up a website for Perl discussion:

"Nope. You can't do that. Nobody will post because their words might get used."

I'm quite glad that they weren't asked.

I rather like the idea, because a couple of times I have needed to look something up, and PerlMonks has been down. I can recall wishing that I had a local copy to refer to. I even considered mirroring it, but thought that would be a rude bandwidth hit on EDC. I'd sling Aus$20 to someone for a copy of the PM CDROM.

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Jeremy
"Someone pass me a lawyer. I can't wait for the revolution!"

I would probably think that 99.9% of the PM userbase would care little that their posts were being used in another medium. And if the world worked like I'd like it (and as you'd like it to,o I would hypothesize), as long as you are posting something in the public medium (here, Usenet, /., whatever), it becomes part of the public domain and therefore, anyone can do whatever they want with it.

Unfortunately, there are lawyers and laws that work against this. Biggest case in point: a recent US Supreme Court case ruled that freelance writers who had their work published in print newspapers have the ability to allow or disallow the inclusion of these articles into other mediums (CDroms, online databases, etc). All you need is one person of that other 0.1% saying that they did not autherize the reproduction of their post in an alternative medium, and PM's got a lawsuit on it's hands, which I agree we all don't want.

How can it be fixed: two possibilities come to mind. Have a box or form data that needs to be filled in when creating a new account that tells the new user that they acknowledge that by posting on PM, they are allowing their words to be used in other media forms if it comes to pass. Add some similar mechanism for all existing users to acknowledge this as well, with the understanding that no reply after 2 months or so indicates acknowledgment (or disagreement, depending on if one wants to be preventative or not). Now you know which posts can be redone in some manner, against despite the fact that some holes might exist. Of course, thinking in this fashion, as long as the hole doesn't exist at a root node level, you probably won't be missing much, assuming that most of the current higher-level monks agree to this.

The other option is to have someone else do this without PM's blessing; grabbing nodes is easy thanks to XML, and one can create their own archive. But this person then opens themselves up to legal problems as described above.

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Dr. Michael K. Neylon - mneylon-pm@masemware.com || "You've left the lens cap of your mind on again, Pinky" - The Brain

The implied contract we users have with Perl Monks is that we own our posts, and they are licensed for use as part of Perl Monks. We don't really have a right to change our minds once we hit submit (although we can edit our posts, I guess), even if vroom should suddenly make millions off the site. Does our implied license extend to making a Perl Monks offline distribution? That's a good question, and I, for one, would not object to that interpretation.

There might be some Fair Use arguments to be made regarding an offline distribution. Certainly nothing prevents jepri from making his own "backup" of the entire site since that is a private use. I recall there being some laws relating to the ability of a database site to be able to copyright the collection, so any third parties attempting to mirror or offer CD-ROMs would want to obtain permission from vroom.

But an official Perl Monks offline distribution? What else would we do with our PM posts, were we going to post our answers to Usenet? Would it impact the market for our posts if vroom made them available offline as well as online? Our posts are freely available for the asking right here at PM, by posting them here we ourselves have probably ruined the market for them. On the other hand, we posted them here without consideration for their offsite/offline reuse. There are some definite arguments to be made both ways.

The case with the freelancers was a bit different, since those licenses specifically laid out the ways in which the media could re-use the stories. All we have here at PM is an implied contract. Unlike, Everything2, PM doesn't even have a FAQ about "Who owns the stuff in PM?". A judge or jury might decide that by posting here we were implicitly granting all rights to PM. Heck, there isn't even a copyright notice at the bottom of the page for PM itself!

The more important question, to my mind, is how the heck do you possibly make a site this dynamic into an offline resource? I suppose you could write a suite of Perl scripts and build a directory tree of XML documents, but it's not a simple translation.