Rather, it seems there may be room for a law to carve out an exception for those, rather than also including a bunch of things that clearly are publishing in th

Rather, it seems there may be room for a law to carve out an exception for those, rather than also including a bunch of things that clearly are publishing in the exception. Meanwhile, what about mailing lists? "But those aren't (necessarily) public! What if we want to put our proceedings on a web site?" Well, luckily there's precedent for that, and the word you're looking for rather than "put" is "publish", and you can absolutely do that, but, naturally, it's publishing, just like if you were to publish a private physical mail mailing list. Either physical publishing needs to get the same protections certain kinds of web publishing have now, or we need to rethink what we've done with web publishing. Unless there's reason to believe we don't need those laws around traditional publishing anymore, the latter seems like the better idea to me.