Date: Sun, 6 Feb 2005 12:19:41 +0100 From: Anthony Atkielski <atkielski.anthony@wanadoo.fr> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: favor Message-ID: <1401586003.20050206121941@wanadoo.fr> In-Reply-To: <LOBBIFDAGNMAMLGJJCKNCEEFFAAA.tedm@toybox.placo.com> References: <1258430214.20050206025603@wanadoo.fr> <LOBBIFDAGNMAMLGJJCKNCEEFFAAA.tedm@toybox.placo.com>
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Ted Mittelstaedt writes: TM> This is a bit of twisting of the definition of "site that is public" TM> in my opinion. The key distinction is between a venue to which access must be explicitly requested and one that a person can visit without any formalities. Asking people to register or subscribe in order to post to a forum is requiring an explicit request for access from participants. This creates a private venue with access limited only to those who have gone through the formalities. And it creates the expectation for each participant that only other participants who have completed the same formalities will have access to the venue. Thus, it is not public. TM> Suppose I setup a webserver at example.com that will only respond TM> to http://www.example.com/12345678qwerty/ and will ignore any other HTTP TM> requests (such as to www.example.com, TM> www.example.com/index.html, etc. TM> TM> I think it would be incredibly difficult to argue that this is a TM> public server in any way. The trailing /12345678qwerty/ is in TM> effect an access password to the material on the website. Just TM> because there's no real .htaccess or some such real HTTP password TM> authentication on the site, doesen't make it a public site. An TM> access password is a password, regardless of whether delivered as a TM> trailing URL or in an HTTP-auth request. I use this method myself, but one must be careful not to give the URL to search engines and not to link to the URL from anywhere else. When I provide content to clients this way, I point out to them that the URL is known to nobody except them, and will thus remain reasonably private unless they point someone or something else to the URL (which is their prerogative). TM> Fortunately, caselaw so far has held that there's no requirement to TM> ask for permission to link, see: TM> TM> http://www.gigalaw.com/library/ticketmaster-tickets-2000-03-27.html TM> TM> So at least the courts aren't idiots yet, here. This has to do with the "moral rights" of copyright holders to control the manner in which their work is presented. More practically, it has to do with the wish of some copyright owners to provide their content for viewing only under certain conditions beneficial to themselves (such as on a specific page with advertising). I think that linking should be permitted by default, unless the owner of a site specifically prohibits it. This allows maximum flexibility while still affording protection to people who don't want deep links into their content. I think that search engines should respect exclusion policies as a matter of courtesy. They should also be held to the terms of use on a site, just as human beings are. On my site, I prohibit deep links, except for search engines under certain conditions. I don't enforce this much, except on rare occasions when someone is pulling just an image off my site, wasting my bandwidth and effectively pirating the image (but whether or not such linking constitutes infringement is yet another can of worms). TM> And of course including another person's site in a frameset of yours TM> is definitely illegal without permission, as it is appropriating TM> another person's copyrighted material for your own use, because TM> doing this makes their material part of your site. I agree, but it's still a gray area as far as jurisprudence is concerned. The trend seems to be in favor of your viewpoint. TM> No, in this I think he did. It's one thing to download a copyrighted TM> piece of material, the copyright violation occurs when the copyrighted TM> piece is actually played on the destination computer, cd player, etc. TM> because only at that instant of use does multiple copies of the material TM> come into existence and the original creator is damaged. I dunno. Traditionally the act of copying itself has constituted infringement, irrespective of whether or not the copy was used. Of course, strict enforcement of that notion raises a lot of technical problems in today's world. TM> If you based copyright violations purely on the idea of making it TM> illegal for someone to posses a copy of the material, then the ISP TM> that owns the proxy server now becomes liable. And of course, TM> archival copies to backup media, etc. also become illegal. That's exactly what the MPAA and RIAA would like to do. TM> You prosecute people for actually stealing the jewels, TM> not for just having the lockpick, crowbar, skimask and gloves. It's hard to prove _use_ of copied material, though, because that is ephemeral and may leave no traces. It's much easier to prove the existence of a copy. Similarly, corporate copyright holders want to make the mere possession of means to copy illegal, since it is easier to prove that than it is to prove that they are actually being used for infringing activities. -- Anthony
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