- From: Aaron Swartz <me@aaronsw.com>
- Date: Fri, 11 Mar 2011 12:04:36 -0500
- To: David Booth <david@dbooth.org>
- Cc: www-tag@w3.org, Jonathan Rees <jar@creativecommons.org>
> - With <embed>, the user's download of the work is caused by the > *website's* decision to use <embed>, *knowing* that this will cause the > user's browser to download the work, potentially without the user even > being aware that the work is not coming from that website. Thus, the > website bears responsibility for the copying that has caused the user's > browser to perform. This does not seem like a distinction that would hold up to architectural scrutiny. In Lynx, obviously, the browser does not request a copy of an embedded video. In some configurations of Gmail and Google Talk, simply sending a textual link to a YouTube video causes the user to request a copy. One can imagine Greasemonkey scripts that convert YouTube links into small embeds. Browsers that do link prefetching may request the results of things that are merely linked to. It's impractical for the author of a page (or an email) to know all possible client configurations. Does the TAG want to rewrite the Web specs so that certain kind of tags (e.g. embed and img, but not a) carry the implication "I have verified that the content published at this URL is not published in violation of copyright law"? That strikes me as insane; copyright laws vary significantly from country to country and even if we decide to limit the World Wide Web to just the US, the leading experts in the field agree that US law is so ambiguous there is no way to be certain whether a published work is infringing or not.
Received on Friday, 11 March 2011 17:06:09 UTC