RE: "Publishing and Linking": roles of intermediaries

I would agree with Noah that TAG is not in the position of drawing conclusion or giving guidance on legal facts. Rather, TAG should help the legal communities, and 
those involved in setting policy, understand the technical workings of the Web as well as try to clarify the technical community's use of terminology, in the hope of 
minimizing misunderstandings.

Thanks

Bin

-----Original Message-----
From: Noah Mendelsohn [mailto:nrm@arcanedomain.com] 
Sent: Friday, June 29, 2012 7:52 PM
To: ashok.malhotra@oracle.com
Cc: www-tag@w3.org
Subject: Re: "Publishing and Linking": roles of intermediaries

On 6/29/2012 9:06 PM, ashok malhotra wrote:
> If chillingeffects.com can say it, why can't we?

Chilling effects is an organization and Web site that has as its motto 
"Monitoring the legal climate for Internet activity". The TAG is the 
technical architecture steering committee for the World Wide Web consortium..

The TAG's charter says [1]: "The TAG's scope is limited to technical issues 
about Web architecture."

I think we agreed awhile ago that, at least for now, our focus in the 
copyright and linking work would be to help the legal communities, and 
those involved in setting policy, to understand the technical workings of 
the Web, so that they would be better able to understand the likely impact 
of regulations or laws that they might promulgate. We also said we would 
try to clarify the technical community's use of terminology, in the hope of 
minimizing misunderstandings. I think those are both appropriate given the 
TAG's charter.

Let's take one of your proposed quotes from Chilling Effects:

"Question: Do I need permission to link to someone else's site?

Answer: In general, if someone is making a website publicly available, 
others may freely link to it. That open linking is what makes the web a 
"web." "

Personally, I would like things to be that way, but this is couched as a 
statement of legal fact. Whether it's accurate as a statement of the law in 
any particular jurisdiction, much less worldwide, is something about which 
I don't think the TAG has any business drawing conclusions.


Noah

[1] http://www.w3.org/2004/10/27-tag-charter.html#Scope

Received on Sunday, 1 July 2012 00:03:45 UTC