RE: Copyright

As noted in the telecom, this is a very interesting issue.  By it's nature,
a well formatted web document is mutable, since HTML is a logical rather
than graphical layout language.  A web document should accommodate itself to
the user agent of the recipient, by reformatting itself to the screen size,
etc.

A really hard-nosed author might argue that their intellectual property
included the spatial relationships of components of the page, in which case
any dynamic reformatting of the page would violate their copyright.  Of
course, they would also be making documents that were inherently
inaccessible and inconvenient even for a good many able-bodied users who
happen to have a different screen resolution than the author intended.

In any other case, reformatting the page by changing font size, for example,
shouldn't be construed as changing the "ideas" of the author.

Denis Anson

-----Original Message-----
From: w3c-wai-ua-request@w3.org [mailto:w3c-wai-ua-request@w3.org]On
Behalf Of George Kerscher
Sent: Tuesday, December 07, 1999 3:22 PM
To: w3c-wai-ua@w3.org
Cc: Susanne Seidelin; daisy-copyright@svb.nl
Subject: Copyright


Hi WAI UA working group,

Ian asked that I comment on some copyright issues that have come up. I did
not see the original post, but I get the drift.

I am not a copyright lawyer, but I do understand the issues. Copyright law
does prevent the modification of a document. The intellectual property (IP)
right holder does have the right to ensure that their  creation is used in
the way it was intended. Their ideas should not be altered.

Persons with disabilities also have rights here. Access to information,
especially in the ""Information Age" is a human right. Without this human
right persons with print disabilities cannot participate in education,
employment, or society.

The human rights of persons with disabilities need not conflict with the
copyright of a IP holder. The intention of a accessible presentation should
not modify the document. It will probably present the information
differently, because of the nature of the way persons with disabilities
access information.  The structure and content of the document is rendered
in a way that is appropriate to the person reading the document.

Libraries for the blind have dealt with this problem for a long, long time.
The DAISY Consortium has prepared a statement that was approved at our last
general meeting. The attached HTML file is the first statement in our
"Structuring Guidelines." The DAISY specifications and the Structure
Guidelines can be found at http://www.daisy.org. Follow the links to NEWS
and TECHNOLOGY for this.

I hope this helps.



Best
George

Received on Tuesday, 7 December 1999 15:52:37 UTC