The Ethics of De-Publishing
Greg Ritter,
Ten Reasons Why,
Jul 11, 2003
I've been following this for the last few days - Dave Winer discovered that Mark Pilgrim has been harvesting his feed every few minutes. Pilgrim, as it turns out, has been tracking changes Winer makes to his weblog. For good reason - my Edu_RSS aggregator has picked up some really scathing remarks posted by Winer (who is defending his particular vision of RSS), then removed (after which he denies that he has said anything bad). Winer complained about the bandwidth, Pilgrim posted a guide to reducing bandwidth in RSS feeds. Winer started talking about copyright restrictions in RSS feeds (and some of his friends at Harvard Law started raising legal questions, which drew a scathing remark from me - if you don't want people to use your content, don't syndicate it). If it weren't for the people involved, it would all be very petty. The interesting question in all of this is: what are the ethics of de-publishing or editing weblogs? Me, I stand by whatever I've posted, no matter how stupid it seems a few minutes later. I may write a correction afterward, but I'll take my lumps if I deserve them. Should I ever be forced for legal reasons to remove something, a big black box will appear in its place. That's my policy, and I'm sticking to it.
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