PRIVACY: X-No-Archive and mail.cypherpunks

[Timothy C. May]

At 10:15 AM -0600 12/3/96, Igor Chudov @ home wrote:

>This is primarily addressed to the person who supports cypherpunks
>mail-to-news gateway. If you know who such person is, please send
>his/her address to me.
....
>I am opposed to seeing my articles showing up in DejaNews and other
>search engines. All my emails and usenet postings have this header
>line. However, when cypherpunks-to-newsgroup gateway reposts all
>articles, it strips this header line. I believe it to be a mistake
>and hope that it will be corrected.

Igor raises an important point.

I believe he is misguided in his expectation that his public utterances in
a forum containing at least 1200 readers (and probably more, through
gateways, etc.) that he can limit uses of his posts. Any recipient of his
public utterances may choose to quote them in other articles, forward them
to friends, archive them on his own disks, etc.

(The interesting issue of whether making a file accessible to a search
engine spider, and hence making the material much more widely accessible,
is unresolved in the courts at this time. I was involved in a forum for
U.S. Copyright Office issues--a virtual electronic forum of law professors
and such--and I brought this issue up several times...with little interest,
I should add.)

"Archive policy arbitrage" is much like "cancellation policy arbitrage":
any site which honors "no archive" policies is likely to be in competition
with sites or search spiders which ignore "no archive" requests. If the
U.S. courts rule--someday--that a "no archive" tag is enforceable (how?),
then this'll just shift the sites and spiders to other jurisdictions.

In a free society it is impossible to control what people do with material
given to them. The best means of protecting one's writings is not to
distribute them.


--Tim May

Just say "No" to "Big Brother Inside"
We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, I know that that ain't allowed.
---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:----
Timothy C. May              | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
tcmay at got.net  408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA  | knowledge, reputations, information markets,
Higher Power: 2^1398269     | black markets, collapse of governments.
"National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."