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.