It Was Inevitable (from: cubanlinks.org | post)
http://cubanlinks.org/blog/post/2005/03/03/It-Was-Inevitable.html
Let’s face it: the World Wide Web has been party to illegal activity since the first web server went up. Digital content (ones and zeros) were simply never accounted for in the original scope of Copyright law. Think about it: every time one machine request data from another machine, a copy is being made! Check out the actually powers and limits that copyright bestows on authors. According to your interpretation of these clauses, I could force Google to stop caching (copying) my website in its Google Cache. Who knows where it ends, should someone choose to raise a stink.
Why bring this up now? Well, for a pretty long time (possibly by blind luck) an peaceful co-existence was had between the producers and consumers of on-line digital content. Millions of people and companies spent time and money gradually creating the incredible and connected ecosystem that billions of people in turn now use on a daily basis. I suppose it’s tempting to think of this situation as a “natural state”, but I don’t think people recongnized how fragile it was.
Today, we are dealing with the uproar over the Google Toolbar and its AutoLink feature. Very intelligent and respected people have chimed in on this topic. I had some thoughts on it a couple of days ago. I want to share some additional ideas that I simply don’t see being addressed:
Content versus Presentation
Argument #1 in favor of AutoLink seems to be the blanket statement that “modification is ok, we’ve been doing it for years”. Fixing tables, rendering broken layouts, proxying out images and pop-ups. These things are all true, but I’m stunned (STUNNED) that people can’t see the difference between modifying the presentation and modifying the content. I mean, these are the same people who stay up until 3am thinking of ways to get all their presentation corralled into style sheets.
The Changing Meaning of “Distribution”
This applies to my contention that Google is distributing an unauthorized “derivative work” for commercial purposes (which is banned by strong copyright, and a no-no for many Creative Commons licenses). I content that the fact that AutoLink’s processing occurs on your personal computer is irrelevant in this new world of distributed computing. If I distribute to you a jumbled mess of ones and zeros, and then I also give you a small, compile program that rearranges each of those bits into a perfect, digital copy of The Beatles “White” album, is it at all reasonable to try to argue that I didn’t technically distribute the album?
Comments (1)
it’s insane, isn’t it? what the hell is going on with this?
here’s a link for you on this - enjoy.
http://www.betterbadnews.com/22
:: posted by iggy on Monday, March 07 2005