> It's just your ideas that dangerous, Robert, not you *grin*
yeah, they're real dangerous. whatever.
If my ideas are so dangerous, how do explain the existence, currently,
of so much freely available original content on the www, WITHOUT the
e-mail transactions you suggest? Never mind that your suggestion
wouldn't really add ANY security or accountability to these transactions
but would simply "thicken" the exchange and its protocols. It seems
that the current implementation of most of the active websites, with
user authentication to access "protected" data/content (granted, many
sites just use user validation to be able to substantiate their hit
counts) would also be "dangerous to the growth of online media".
It is my hope that content creators, artists, writers, educators, etc.
can enjoy legal protection for being able to fairly profit by sharing
their ideas, vision, and work with the net.community. I never advocated
stealing, but I think that the decentralized aspects of the Internet
will make enforcement of these rules/laws a challenge. The really bad,
really dangerous people will lie, cheat, and steal online the same way
they do offline.
So, if you need to, put any information you wouldn't want just ANYONE
(or everyone) to see/download/copy/cache behind a secure web server's
authentication barrier. Or at least, don't expect me to be surprised
when your "important" stuff (whatever you want to call it) gets
downloaded, copied, redistributed, or stolen... If everyone protects
themselves, then the malicious "content crooks" will have a much harder
time of repurposing peoples' work unfairly.
But I don't think archives or net.agents shopping or taking notes at a
site should have to pay just to "copy" a sites contents and redistribute
it or point other users back to it. That seems like a loss for everyone
concerned (ie, if I don't pay Yahoo, they won't include my neat new site
in their databases...but if they don't pay me, then I'll sue them ??)
This would seems like a more "dangerous" situation to me, in that no new
prospective customers would come see my (hypothetical) neat new site!
(zzzz. I'm tired of this thread, anyway.)
-- Rob Turk <mailto:rturk@austin.ibm.com> Always Un-Officially Speaking Web Work <http://toolbox.austin.ibm.com/~rturk> http://www.megalith.com If life is a stage, I want some better lighting.