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.

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

In reply to Re: Re: Re: Re: Perl Monks Cdrom Distribution by Masem
in thread Perl Monks Cdrom Distribution by bladx

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