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. -- | GOOD TIME FOR MOVIE - GOING ||| Mike McNally <m5@tivoli.com> | | TAKE TWA TO CAIRO. ||| Tivoli Systems, Austin, TX: | | (actual fortune cookie) ||| "Like A Little Bit of Semi-Heaven" |