Since I'm not sure that Joe and I substantively disagree, I just want to clarify my comments. My main points about publicly archived data is that, if we work from the position that this is human subjects research, we must deal with issues of consent. Being unable to reach a poster does not excuse the researcher from the obligation to obtain consent. If we work from the position that it is not human subjects research, however, we must deal with a different set of issues. Namely, crediting the source. As Joe points out, it is certainly fair use for a researcher to use this information, but "fair use" also requires crediting the source of information obtained. To me, however, neither of these positions are really comfortable. These hypothetical archives are certainly publicly available. So, there's a strong foundation for saying that this is not human subjects work. But, as research by Joe and others has suggested, people often feel freer to say certain things online than they would in other media. (Of course, the devil is in the details of that statement. Suffice it to say, online interaction is often different than other media.) The environment, in some ways, leads people to be less aware of the consequences of their actions. As the Deja News situation showed, people are often shocked by how public their actions online are, even though they shouldn't be. I believe that since the Internet is so new to the common user, we cannot just assume that Internet users are truly consenting to the public archiving of various forums. That said, I don't know what the answer is. I tend to think that the answer lies somewhere between these two perspectives. As researchers, we have a right to use publicly available data, but we also have an obligation to protect subjects, even sometimes protecting them from themselves. So, I guess it probably comes down to the potential for harm. There's probably little harm in most linguistic work, but much more in certain sociological studies. Maybe the necessity for consent with publicly available material should increase as the potential for harm increase? Just speculating... Jim ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Jim Hudson | Ph.D. Student College of Computing | jhudson@cc.gatech.edu Georgia Tech | http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~jhudson Atlanta, GA 30332-0280 | Phone: 404-894-9761 | Fax: 404-894-0673 ------------------------------------------------------------------------