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Re: request

 sb@dcs.qmw.ac.uk Sergio --

 There is a difference between a mailing-list and a news-group;
 a world difference, quite literally.

...
 When posting to a mailing-list, you send your "mail" to a restricted
 number of persons, namely all and only those persons who are
 subscribed at that very moment, possibly including additional
...
Submitting an article to a select academic journal, you won't reach as many readers as something in the Washington Post. You don't have more or less rights as a reader or publisher of a select journal than a newspaper, by nature of the numbers.
There is no affirmative right to retract in U.S. law, even in moral rights jurisidictions the right is constrained. 
I believe the publication discussion is a red herring.

Debian is a library, not a lover you write a letter to.


 When you subscribe to a mailing-list, you are just doing this. You
 are *not* signing an agreement for which every "mail" you send to
 that list is also published, for the world at large to read at any
 time; you are *just* signing an agreement for which you are entitled
 to (1) receive the mail posted by others on that list, and to (2)
 post your mail to that list, until you unsubscribe. Period. If you
 want your mail published, you only have four possibilities: (1) you
 put your mail in your Internet page, (2) you post your mail as a file
 to a news-group, (3) you post your mail to a news-paper or other
 officially registered periodical, (4) you write a collection and
 publish it as a book.
Lack of a written instrument is not controlling. Under U.S. law Sec. 101, non-exclusive licenses are not required to have an instrument and the trial court is going to interpret the scope of the license (as with any license). See Effects Associates v. Cohen. 

Implied waivers and consent are common in the law.


 At the time of writing, Debian is publishing the content of all its
 mailing-lists *without* the authors' explicit consent. This consent
 in fact, *can not* be implicit as some of you has claimed.
Why is it consent may not be implied? I do not believe your assertion is supported by U.S. or other case law. 


 I understand that there is a certain bad practice on the Internet,
 but you please understand at this point that this bad practice does


What bad practice?  Storage of messages?


 not modify the law, and that if Debian (and other similar


What law is being modified?

To what right are you referring?
Did you place a technology measure on the access of your postings that is being violated? :)_ (sorry bad joke...) 


 organisations) keeps acting against the law (in the given case),
 sooner or later these actions will be legally hold against the
 organisation. The fact itself that the problem is being discussed,
 should be sufficient for Debian to take immediate countermeasures,
 which incidentally are also quite easily implementable.
 Preventing is in fact easier and better than curing.



You are displeased with the current terms of the lists; that is unfortunate.
There may be no harm in making some of the terms of the mailing list explicit in the subscription agreement, however. I suggest it include an explicit license to use, copy, adapt or otherwise cause the submissions to be freely available to the public without limitation (OPL seems good choice?); and an explicit waiver of moral rights within the scope of Debian and its agents use. It should include rights to any attachments to submissions which could include pictorial, sound, software executables, etc. in line with the GPL. We need to protect against claims of secondary infringment in our redistributions, should somebody infringe in posting something.
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