Important word, there. The courts will be the ones to
decide guilt, and I am still not eager to test some of these
issues.
> Theft of service: various news admins around the world make space
> available on their newspool for the *.answers groups. Frequently
> these groups are given a much longer expire time than others because
> the admins expect that any posting made to these groups will have the
> authorisation of the *.answers moderation team. Hence an unauthorised
> message on these groups will not meet the conditions given by the news
> admins for this extra use of disk space, and so will have stolen the
> service of disk storage.
If I write a draft FAQ, and post it to several unmoderated
groups for comments, and add an "Expires" header to keep it
alive for a month, would administrators of sites which
expire news in a week have the grounds to sue me for theft
of service?
> Unauthorised modification: By a similar argument, side-effects of the
> posting to *.answers (such as the updating of various directories and
> index files) are also unauthorised and hence illegal.
That seems rather tenuous to me. I'm reluctant to charge
someone with "unauthorized modification" to my system which
was purely an incidental side effect of some other,
genuinely unauthorized action. The authorized posting of my
FAQ surely has a countless number of ripple effects at the
system level, adding flags to filesystems, flipping bits in
RAM, and so on; we'd have to be rather careful in order to
define the difference between "permissible" and
"impermissible" side effects of posting.
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