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.
Most of your comments seem to be nitpicking vocabulary, which doesn't seem important.
I can, however, say with certainty that this has nothing to do with copyright. I don't think we'd need to get those people to agree to the logs being published because they have copyright claims as to what was said. Though, I expect they might. I think we'd need to get those people to agree to the logs being published because that is the polite thing to do, given their original expectations, and the current circumstances. This isn't a legal issue, and it certainly isn't a technological issue. It's a social issue. And this is why any discussion about the law, or about the technical aspects, misses the point.