Re: Control on the right to create annotation

Daniel- I'm just rushing out of the office right now and then leaving town,
so I'm going to try and bang out a quick response while I still have acess
to my mail. Forgive me if I get a little sloppy...


>I might be suggesting something like this usenet idea (if I understand
>you) in
>
>  http://union.ncsa.uiuc.edu/~liberte/www/scalable-annotations.html 
>

I suspect I am. I really like the ideas in the public annotations paper. I'm
working on a more detailed proposal for a Usenet-based annotation system
with the help of an online friend who's got a little more technical
background than I do. I'd send you info on it, but the other guy's the
primary author, and I want to get his permission before distributing it.


>
> > my paper, at http://www.muchmusic.com/muchmusic/cyberfax/annot.html
>
>In this you say:
>
>"" Issues of annotation are being discussed by the Annotation Working
>"" Group of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).  The focus of the group
>"" now seems to be firmly placed on providing distributed working groups
>"" tools through which to use the Web for collaboration- a notion called
>"" "annotation sets" would provide small-to-medium sized groups with
>"" tools for sharing web annotations. The system being discussed doesn't
>"" preclude the possibility of a universally commentable Web, but the
>"" group generally views the possibility as a special case which should
>"" not be given high priority. The closest thing to universal comments in
>"" their published literature is found in the backlinks scenario, which
>"" ends with the caveat that it should not be seen as a necessary goal of
>"" the system's design.
>
>This might be a misunderstanding.  I don't remember anyone saying that
>a universally commentable web should not be given a high priority.  I
>think it is probably the opposite. 

Hmm. Hope I haven't misrepresnted the goals of w3c-annot too badly. I may
only have made my point less clearly that I should have- By "Universally
Commentable", I mean a system that allows users to see _all_ comments added
to any page, regardless of what set they may be in. This would require
either being able to search for annotations across all known sets (which
would presumably be really impractical), or setting up a single set of the
size and scale of the backlinks one- which is specifically given low priority.

Have I misread the w3c-annot literature, or was I just not clear enough in
what I was describing as low-priority? In either case, I'll fix my
description of the w3c-annot project when I get back into town.


> On the other hand, your solutions
>to universal commentability seem to tend toward gargantuan,
>centralized services, and it is those we considered not a high
>priority.

Agreed. I'm no fan of gargantuan, centralized services either. I just think
they may prove pragmatically necessary if you're to allow for a system that
lets users see _all_ the comments that have been added to a given page.

>
> > >And Daniel LaLiberte wrote:
> > >One might set up a
> > >parallel DNS tree for annotation services, but this potentially has
> > >the same problem since every server might have some legal power
> > >over the corresponding annotation server.
> > 
> > I don't think I understand what you're getting at here, and I'm really
> > interested in knowing. If you could actually get enough people to host
> > 3rd-party annotation servers, a parallel DNS tree of some sort seems like a
> > perfectly fine solution for allowing the browser to find the appropriate
> > annotation server for a given page.
>
>I'm not clear on what the legal issues are, and they probably vary
>from country to country.  If there were hundreds of such parallel DNS
>trees, there might be no problem at all since there would be too many
>to fight.  But if there were only a few, which is what seems required
>to have just a few places to go to get public annotations, then these
>might be targets for trademark infringment lawsuits.

They really shouldn't be. You can write a book or magazine article called
"All about Microsfoft". You can run TV ads for a store saying "Our prices
are lower than Wal-Mart's". Trademark law just means I can't start a
magazine called "Microsoft Mag" or open a store called "Misha's Wal-Mart".
You can _mention_ trademarked terms in all sorts of contexts, and I'd be
very surprised if a parellel DNS tree were considered trademark infringement.

In any event, couldn't the parellel tree just work using the IP numbers
rather than domain names of the servers being annotated?

Gotta run and catch a train now...


        - Misha

Received on Thursday, 22 August 1996 15:04:01 UTC