Thanks for proposing the idea but seems this would be actually conflicting with the actual idea of asset expiration which is directly related to the licensing of the asset. Please refer to [1] which cleary states : "Asset expiration is an effective way to enforce license requirements for assets. It ensures that the published asset is unpublished when it expires, which averts the possibility of any license violation. A user without administrator permissions cannot edit, copy, move, publish, and download an expired asset."
Let us know if you have any additional questions on the same.
@Akash_Kapoor - but would that mean it's better to break someone's website? I submitted this as an enhancement because no one can really use the OOTB expiration field because it automatically un-publishes the asset. Our stakeholders don't want that to happen. If an asset expires, it's up to them to manually unpublish the asset and replace it with a new asset
Thanks for the link. Having worked with AEM (and CQ before that) we understand how it works.
Specifically, because of the auto-unpublish, using the OOTB expires functionality is almost useless for both us (Accenture internal AEM implementation and our clients. In working with AEM for the last 8 years, I have never had a client that was able to live with having pages break when an image expires. For clients that want to use rights management capabilities, we've had to implement a custom expiration solution because we can't just have pages break when an image expires and then have to go back and fix them. All we're asking for is the ability control whether to unpublish images automatically or not based on some configuration (e.g. auto-unpublish = on/off) would solve for this. While we understand the risk of unlicensed content, we have to balance that against the poor experience and brand reputation of broken images on web pages.
We currently have to implement a custom expiration field, create a custom search predicate to look ahead to assets about to expire, and implementing all the other "expires" functionality such as making it so a user without administrator permissions cannot edit, copy, move, publish, and download an expired asset for our custom field.
