Re: XHTML2.0 - transclusion

> > Author of the document must explicitly allow translclusion of his
> > work. 
> 
> Why? Isn't this what intellectual property law is for?

Given that the first mention of transclusion (server mediated, I think)
on this list, some time ago, was from someone who gave the impression
of believing that copyright law should be ignored, I think there will be
significant pressure from copyright owners to have technical enforcement
measures included.  (And more generally, the internet gives the ability
to copy to the general public and the general public doesn't really 
appreciate intellectual property law[B].)

I would expect, though, that most authors would never learn that 
transclusion permissions could be turned on and, of those commercial
sites that were aware, the vast majority would have a policy of
forbidding transclusion (many site still have explicit statements that
deep linking (i.e. proper web links) are not allowed[A], and sometimes 
enforce this by trying to force a redirect to the home page, and a lot of
sites now use scripting to try and prevent copy and pasting of the
rendered page, and access to view source).

That would probably leave a relatively small community of transclusion
enthusiasts.  However, I suspect, as enthusiasts, they would probably
be using open source browsers, so could easily disable the restrictions,
at least as far as use within the community was concerned.

Personally, I have reservations about all technical enforcement of
copyright except for things like money and tickets, because it generally
makes the product fragile, stifles legitimate innovation, may be a problem
for future historians, and moves the balance too far towards the marketer
(often it is the marketer, not the creative person, that benefits) in
a way that, for example, erodes the US fair use concept.  However, now
that the web is primarily commercial, I will expect strong lobbying for
technical enforcement in all new features.  (I would actually welcome a
change in legislation to explicitly void all deep linking restrictions -
I'm not convinced about the legal enforcibility of terms of use pages
anyway.)

[A] This is by no means limited to those sites which use security by
obscurity to limit access to logged in users.

[B] I've had people send me scans of signicant parts of text books and
advocating peeer to peer sites that broadcast Hollywood movies, as well
as the foreign language material that was relevant, thinking that they
were simply doing me a favour and they were doing nothing wrong.

Received on Wednesday, 24 January 2007 08:10:05 UTC