[thelist] How to prevent web site piracy & copyright infringement?

Timothy J. Luoma lists at tntluoma.com
Sat Oct 12 12:34:01 CDT 2002


 > PXL Transmitter wrote: Hello,

Hi.  You didn't start a new thread (hitting 'reply' and then changing
the subject doesn't really start a new thread) and your message might be
missed by people using mailers which collapse threads.

So I started a new thread, and quoted more than I normally would, in
case people missed the original.


 > Web designers, editors, authors, publishers etc. should have the
 > ability to decide if they wish to protect their web site content.

I have mixed feelings about this.

I started writing web pages by View Source and copy & paste.  I suspect
a lot of others did too.

 > As the author and publisher of a web site. I wish to have the
 > possibility to include a meta-tag on my web pages for example which
 > prevents browsers to view the source code and the links on my web
 > pages. Web site visitors would only see the top level-domain of the
 > appropriate web site. This meta tag would make browsers a "read-only"
 > application such as the Adobe Acrobat PDF format.

My guess is that anyone with determination could still edit a PDF file
marked 'read only'

 > As with PDF documents and Macromedia flash files, the viewer does not
 > have the ability to have a closer insight on *how* the layout has been
 > formatted. Besides, users do not have the possibility to select text
 > information of a document.

True, but other vector formats will be text-based, right?


 > I believe, web site authors and publishers should have the right to
 > decide weather they wish to keep their web pages "open-source" or not.

If it wasn't for the open source movement and open standards, you
couldn't have a web page in the first place.


 > Some web site design and its development requires a notable amount of
 > time and know-how to be produced. This time and effort which has been
 > investigated belongs entirely to the intellectual property of the
 > designer, producer, editor, internet application developer, IT company
 > etc.

Real question: shall we start to pay royalties to sendmail and Apache folks?


 > The current browser standards do not offer *any* security issues for
 > authors, publishers, artists and other companies to protect their
 > content in order to prevent web site piracy and copyright
 > infringements.

True.

 > I would be interested to hear your opinions on this subject.

I'm almost always in favor of choice.  However, I worry about what would
happen with new ideas if they were all thought about as "capital".

<hypothetical>
If you need help with something on your site, and I give you a tip that
helps make your site work better in Opera, will you share that part of
the source code with others, or will it all be blocked?  What gives you
the right to block others from seeing what was freely given to you?  How
will you make the distinction?
</hypothetical>

It has the possibility to squash a lot of what I love about the web.

On the other hand, I agree with the fact that if you spend 10 weeks on a
site design, it can suck that someone else comes along and steals it in
10 seconds.


You raised the question well, although I don't know if we will get
anywhere with it.

TjL, currently trying to learn the DOM & JS and benefitting greatly from
being able to see others' code






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