I don't think these issues of copyright have been resolved, and they are
probably going to be discussed this week when on Thursday September 12,
the Senate Commerce Committee is scheduled to vote to send the
Burns/Leahy "Promotion of Commerce Online in the Digital Era (Pro-CODE)
Act (S. 1726) to the full Senate. [ PLEASE see http://www.cdt.org/crytpo
for more information on these critical matters related to commerce,
security, encryption, and privacy rights...]
Besides, there have been no definitive statements of how existing
Copyright laws' "Fair Use" clauses apply to this distributed network.
The "reader" isn't always going to be a human being, necessarily, but
how will your web servers be able to keep your great pricing on widget X
(as an example) available to the general widget buying public without
tipping off the other widget distributors as to your latest pricing
schemes? We would want for automated agents to peruse our great widget
pricing, in order to report to their owners how great our pricing is,
but would someone have to commit to a transaction (or perform some kind
of authentication) before getting access to the pricing data?
It gets so complicated...one thing's for sure, if your sensitive data is
archived without your consent, I'd say you didn't protect it well
enough. Oh yeah, and be sure to include an <A
HREF="http://my.cool.website.com"> or <A
HREF="mailto:my.sociopathic.lawyer@my.cool.website.com"> type link in
your copyright statement (that way it'll be easy for end users to find
your copyright statement and/or harrass you about it...)
Once again, this is simply my opinion...
-- Rob Turk <mailto:rturk@austin.ibm.com> Always Un-Officially Speaking Web Work <http://toolbox.austin.ibm.com/~rturk> http://www.megalith.com It may be that your whole purpose in life is simply to serve as a warning to others.