UK Apple/Samsung possibly pertinent to TAG work on Publishing and Linking?

See: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/nov/01/apple-samsung-statement

To some degree this is just about the wording of Apple's statement, but it 
also relates to a legal question of whether publishing something in a way 
that requires (in a typical user agent) clicking on a link has the same 
impact as publishing in some more visible way.

I'm only half-convinced this is pertinent to the TAG's work, but am passing 
it on just in case:

Argument pro: you could make the case that the <a href> is just a piece of 
mechanism, and different user agents might or might not require certain 
user activity to see the text to which it links. That's a subtlety a court 
might or might not notice. Wget, for example, might load the linked warning 
with essentially no extra effort on the user's part (though wget, of 
course, doesn't directly present anything to users).

Argument con: in practice, most desktop user agents (browsers) handle this 
the same way, and indeed link text rendered in small type is easy to miss 
and requiring a click is very different than just including or transcluding 
text.

Anyway, that's the link if anyone is interested.

Noah

Received on Thursday, 1 November 2012 15:09:13 UTC