- From: Roy T. Fielding <fielding@gbiv.com>
- Date: Wed, 2 Jun 2010 16:22:32 -0700
- To: ashok.malhotra@oracle.com
- Cc: Noah Mendelsohn <nrm@arcanedomain.com>, Tim Berners-Lee <timbl@w3.org>, "www-tag@w3.org" <www-tag@w3.org>
On Jun 2, 2010, at 2:51 PM, ashok malhotra wrote: > Let me argue the other side. If I make my living serving copyrighted content, allowing > unrestricted copy/paste is handing out a license to steal/plagiarize. So, how do I protect myself? > -- disallow copy? add a hidden watermark that can be used for legal prosecution? What do book publishers do with their copyrighted content? Do they use trick watermarking to make it hard to photocopy? No. They use the courts to enforce copyright. Copyright is comparatively easy to enforce, and (at least in US) law bends over backwards in favor of the copyright owner with very steep per-copy charges. The easiest way to discover stolen content is to search for unique phrases, and that works regardless of the cut-and-paste tool used to copy them. What is much harder is finding the entity responsible for publishing the illegal copies once they are found. However, almost all cut-and-paste style interaction via a browser is for the sake of fair use, which is entirely legal in the US no matter who owns the copyright. I doubt that the real intended use of the javascript is to enforce copyright -- it is just a marketing tool, like all the other privacy-invading javascript junk. It is using the links to enhance cross-site analytics, which is a privacy concern, not a copyright concern. While I support the notion of not messing with the cut buffer for UI sanity (i.e., allowing this is a browser bug), I think it is pointless to argue about this tool as a legitimate means of copy control. ....Roy
Received on Wednesday, 2 June 2010 23:23:02 UTC