Re: add something the all pages

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.

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.

> 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.

...
> 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.

> 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