Delirium wrote:
Excessive avoidance of activities that are not likely to result in legal troubles, but which some people irrationally fear might, is pretty much the definition of "chilling effects" style paranoia.
Seriously, do you think *mailing list archives*, and non-search-engine-indexed ones at that, are actually illegal? It's not even clear that such archives legally constitute publication, and certainly they are far less high profile than many other sources that have *not* been held legally accountable in any way, such as Google's own archives, or Wired's explicit publication.
The DMCA does not prohibit publication, it prohibits "trafficking". The MPAA vs Corely case held that publication on a website constitutes trafficking, and this was upheld at appeal. The Act specifies damages of $200-$2500 per "act of circumvention, device, product, component, offer, or performance of service". Presumably every time someone downloads the number from the mailing list archive, and every time we send it to someone by email, this constitues trafficking of such a device.
WikiEN-L has 878 members, so sending the key to the list would create a liability of between $175,600 and $2.2M, plus archive downloads and what not.
-- Tim Starling