Re: add something the all pages

From: Dancer <dancer@dont-contact.us>
Date: Thu, 12 Aug 1999 07:37:41 +1000

Clifton Royston wrote:
>
> Dancer writes:
> > Henrik Nordstrom wrote:
> > > Dancer wrote:
> ...
> > > Not to mention angry content providers disapproving with you adding
> > > things to their content... (some claim it is even a copyright intrusion)
> >
> > Many major filtering systems do this sort of thing (N2H2 for example). I
> > think it would be a stretch to see it as a copyrigfht issue, though.
> > After all, web-content is made available to be passed to arbitrary
> > renderers...and some of those renderers (if you look very closely) also
> > add bits and pieces of their own to the HTML sometimes before actually
> > displaying it. (Netscape and MSIE both do this to a very minor degree on
> > _most_ pages).
>
> You're assuming copyright law either takes account of what's common
> practice on the net, or is based in what's common-sense. It most
> definitely does neither at present.

Good point there. I forgot to take that into account. However most of
the murky issues are usually solved by analogy and counter-analogy.
Analogy: It's like a librarian stamping the library's name and address
at the top of every page of a book (quite a common practice in some
parts).

> There is a lawsuit being seriously pursued by Universal Pictures
> against a web site on the issue of "deep linking" - the site being sued
> doesn't alter anything, doesn't present it as its own, but simply links
> directly from its pages to content files on Universal's own web
> servers. Universal regards this as copyright infringement, and is
> prepared to spend a lot of money to test that case. They may be wrong
> in principle, but they could end up being right in the law - or could
> be wrong, but have the legal firepower to prevail because the defendant
> can't afford the money to set legal precedents.

If they said "don't do this" on their pages, then I'd probably support
them. If they're just miffed 'cause they didn't expect it, I probably
wouldn't.

>
> > Let's take a few small steps:
> > Sure, it's tiny, but suddenly we have a grey area...the browser can and
> > does add HTML code to a page. Does that infringe copyright? No...because
> > if it did, the company would not have a web-site.
>
> As copyright law is not based on common sense, that very well might
> infringe copyright. Until the US law was rewritten last year to
> specifically deal with caching of net content, there was a pretty good
> case that not only caching in networks (a la Squid) but even Netscape
> or IE's caching pages to the hard drive was an illegal copyright
> infringement in the US, if anyone had wanted to make a case of it.
> *Not* just my humble opinion, that opinion came from the most
> experienced intellectual property lawyer in Hawaii.

You are quite correct here. Caching still does violate copyright law in
many countries in the world....Allow me to rephrase that, though...it
can be _construed_ to be a violation. There's a couple of those fuzzy
areas that can be fought, but usually (obviously with the exception of
Universal mentioned earlier) most folks simply specify specific things
rather than attempt to throw light on any murky bits of the copyright
acts.

Flip side: Web publishing _requires_ implicit replication and
transmission of material. Quite aside from what we refer to as caching.

>
> ...
> > A user clicks on 'Whats related' or opens netscape messenger, and the
> > request is redirected to show local content rather than content from
> > netscape. Violation? Of what, exactly?
>
> Could, quite seriously, involve violation of copyright law, trademark
> law (a completely different set of rules), or both. There was a case
> last year, for instance, on whether it was a violation of trademark law
> for a search-engine to (for money) list certain retail sites first when
> searching for a trademarked product name. I don't know if that case
> was decided, but the bulk of the case law seemed to say it was.

Heh. Our national phone carrier does that. Whoever pays the most gets
first listing in all the directory assistance services. A variation on
this theme happens in our yellow pages books.

> > Messy, ugly territory.
>
> Indeed.
> -- Clifton
>
> --
> Clifton Royston -- LavaNet Systems Architect -- cliftonr@lava.net
> "An absolute monarch would be absolutely wise and good.
> But no man is strong enough to have no interest.
> Therefore the best king would be Pure Chance.
> It is Pure Chance that rules the Universe;
> therefore, and only therefore, life is good." - AC
Received on Wed Aug 11 1999 - 15:40:43 MDT

This archive was generated by hypermail pre-2.1.9 : Tue Dec 09 2003 - 16:47:56 MST