Re: [W3C] Draft Mobile Web BPWG / comments

Boy, I'm not a lawyer, so perhaps I shouldn't even try to comment, but:

My understanding is that transcoding falls under fair-use provisions.
It might not if you're doing sneaky stuff like profiting from the
content via ads or something.

So I don't think a copyright statement is equivalent to no-transform
directive, to begin with. But do you have a reference for this? if
there are clear legal implications, these deserve mention.

I have never heard of a company asking us to not transcode on
copyright grounds. I sure have heard of companies being angry that
their (copyrighted) site isn't showing up as a transcoded result.
Based on my anecdotal experience, I disagree with your conclusion
about what a copyright statement signals... and really we have a lot
more experience to draw on in this regard.

I sure don't argue that a transcoder therefore should feel entitled to
transcode anything under fair-use protections. If the author doesn't
want that, the author can be explicit about it with a no-transform
directive. Why not use that to be clear then?



On Tue, Aug 5, 2008 at 1:33 PM, casays <casays@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>>On WML:
>>
>>This is a tricky one. We do actually want WML to be transformed to WMLC.
>
> This means you want to recode from WML to WBMXL, but not to
> restructure -- and indeed, I have seen restructurings of WML
> code by proxies whose outcome was next to unusable.
>
>>On Copyright:
>>...
>>Indeed, when authoring HTML, the author cannot have a precise view of
>>the visual form of their work because intentionally, and by their
>>nature, Web browsers do not set out to provide identical experiences.
>
> Actually, the variation of representations is fundamentally grounded
> on a specification: HTML 4.0.1 is littered with warnings that it does
> not prescribe an exact representation of specific constructs and that
> client programs may take different decisions as to how to handle HTML
> constructs (including modalities like graphical vs. textual vs. audio
> browsers). That is the standard, and as such developers and content
> providers cannot complain of differences in representation within the
> scope of the standard.
>
> It is a completely different matter to perform transformations that
> are outside the scope of the standard, and in particular the whole
> gambit of inserting ads, links to extraneous content, logos, and in
> general media that was not present there in the first place, like is
> occurring disturbingly more frequently nowadays.
>
> Observe that an increasing number of corporate and commercial WWW
> sites include copyright notices, basically stating: "We developed this
> content. It belongs to us. No derivative works allowed." The presence
> of a copyright meta-tag in the original content is indicative of such
> intended restrictions and should therefore be properly taken into account.
>
>
> E. Casais
>
>
>

Received on Tuesday, 5 August 2008 18:41:47 UTC