While I was in the process of editing this article my good friend and co-founder Max Ogden told me he had just been asked to take down http://archive.couchdb.org, an IRC log and search utility he wrote for the IRC and Mailing List messages of the CouchDB project. [strike]It's unclear which esoteric Apache rule this tool violates, other than being useful and not being hosting at Apache, but[strike] he was told it's a "privacy violation" which is odd considering it only logs public IRC and Mailing List messages.
[Update] It has been clarified that the request to take down archive.couchdb.org was made by an ASF committer, possibly with the support of other #couchdb users, but is not a violation of ASF rules and the request was made on their own behalf and not the ASF. The only policy that has been metioned is the freenode guidlines which caution against logging but do not ban it outright.
uhm, first of all, I don't agree with the idea that we start censoring public information (if anybody can join your channel, then that is a public channel), but put that aside.
Your pub example is a bit flawed: at a pub you usually have your own table, where you can adjust your volume, that others can't hear it.
I as a stranger can't just walk in, and sit to your table, and start listening to your conversation.
If I would, then probably you would ask me to leave, or you would leave, or you wouldn't discuss sensitive topics.
On a channel, everybody can "hear" everybody else, and having your channel open to join means that it is publically available to anybody.
I find it hard to believe that there are still people out there, who think that one can censor the internet. If you put something up, there is a good chance, that you can never remove it anymore.
We have newsgroup archives, mailing list archives now, it is natural that we also have irc archives, (and webcrawlers which cache and re-publish content, and web.archive.org, etc.).
AFAIK group contacts aren't "stakeholders" of the channel, but as the name suggests, they are contacts, if you want to poke freenode for support, your groups contact should take care of it, and when Freenode wants to contact you, guess what, they will poke the group contact.
So I can't see how should you be responsible for other people mistakes regarding your channel. So even if accept that logging is against Freenodes policy(which technically isn't, at it is only mentioned in the guidelines, and the following the guidelines is strongly adviced but not mandatory by the policy) I don't think that you could be personally responsible in any way,
Uhm, the irc channel is run by Freenode, not by you, I'm guessing that you ment that you are the channel operator/group contact, which totally makes sense, because the Group Contact should be somebody from the high-up from the group itself, so the an Apache representative shouldn't qualify for that.
btw. I would like to point out, that there are also existing archives for your channel out there:
http://irclogger.com/.couchdb/2010-11-27