Re: Author rights

Philippe, 
Copyright is a legal protection, not a technical one. I believe that you
can copyright your SVG files by just putting a copyright notice inside a
<metadata> element or even with an XML comment. The copyright notice takes
care of the legal protection angle, but does little to stop someone who
doesn't care about the law from extracting your content. In general, any
technical solution can be broken. Thus, most applications software packages
these days offer few technical barriers to piracy, and instead depend more
on legal methods than technical methods.

My understanding is that the SWF protection is very simple and thus easily
hacked, but it does provide a first level technical barrier. I agree that
something comparable is needed at some point for SVG to meet the needs of
certain markets. Adding an approach similar to the SWF approach might be
done by simply defining a single new attribute or defining a standard
metadata entry which disables the ability to copy protected content (e.g.,
disable save or view source). So, it would be easy to add something to the
SVG language should the SVG working group feel compelled to do so. 

However, with SVG 1.0, so far the SVG working group has punted on such a
feature, largely because we have been waiting to see whether a general XML
solutions would appear which SVG could use, because so much content these
days is in the form of unprotected images (GIF, JPEG) and unprotected HTML
and because it is high time to close the door and ship SVG 1.0. The
thinking (at least among some) is that maybe we can wait until after SVG
1.0 before facing up to the issue.

Jon Ferraiolo
SVG Editor
Adobe Systems Incorporated

At 03:43 PM 7/5/00 -0700, Philippe Converset wrote:
>Is there a way of copyrighting a svg file ?
>I mean, how an author can be sure that his work will not be modified without
>his authorization ?
>
>The big advantage of the Flash format is that the file can not be edited
>without the source, thus author rights are respected.
>If you, reader, are an author, will you turn from Flash to SVG if there is
>no more copyright on your work ?
>
>I'm afraid that SVG might not be used for real content like "web cartoon"
>because of this lack of copyright. I hope not !
>

Received on Wednesday, 5 July 2000 20:49:38 UTC