Re: [CTG]: Novarra going for mobile sites too

Tom Hume wrote:
>
> Luca
>
> The point has been raised many times and challenged by parties more 
> qualified to give a legal opinion than yourself: Rigo Wenning, Legal 
> Counsel of the W3C asserted that the existence of, and respect for, 
> no-transform allows content providers to express their wish to avoid 
> transformation. Content owners have rights: they can be protected.

I am sorry, but I disagree with a few things here. Rigo's opinion is 
certainly qualified, but I think that it is far from being the last word 
on the subject. Two points in particular:

 > existence of [..] no-transform allows content providers to express their
 > wish to avoid transformation.

so, if I place a T&C page on my site that clearly says that it's all my 
copyright and nobody has the right to create derivative work without 
consent, all of that is void whenever "no-transform" is not being used? 
I think I can refer to a choir of qualified lawyers who will chant "I 
don't think so".

 > Content owners have rights: they can be protected

even assuming that "programmatic" defense of the content is possible, I 
argue that "no-transcode" is not a good enough way.
In the discussion, the comparison has been made with robots.txt. 
Robots.txt has an advantage over "no-trasform": you create it once and  
it applies to the whole site.
No-transform on the other hand needs to be applied at each and every 
resource you serve through your web server. But there is more, my 
request to evaluate the possibility that a single no-transform per page 
should apply to all of the resources contained in the page has been 
explicitly discarded by the group.
So, I think "no-transform" is too taxing for content provider to adopt 
to protect their content, and I argue that, having been a practitioner 
in the mobile business for years, I am more qualified than Rigo in this 
very technical matter.



>
> I believe that last time I pointed this out, you asserted that your 
> own opinion of the legalities should take priority, saying "in that 
> particular case, I believe I am more qualified than Rigo. A lawyer can 
> say that there must be a way for websites to tell transcoders not to 
> transcode them, but he cannot be more qualified than me in saying what 
> those ways should be"[1]

exactly, and I stand my case. I think that Rigo is not technical enough 
to provide a qualified opinion about whether "no-transcode" is a good 
enough way to protect content (again, assuming that content needs to be 
protected more than copyright notices already do).

Luca


>
> Tom
>
> [1] See http://wapreview.com/blog/?p=1837
>
> On 12 Feb 2009, at 13:39, Luca Passani wrote:
>
>>  Content owners have rights too and must be respected. This point I 
>> raised several times and nobody ever challenged it (they just ignored 
>> it and kept arguing about users)
>
>
>

Received on Thursday, 12 February 2009 16:59:09 UTC