>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?
Because copyright law protects the creators of that content. Those "email
transactions" were suggested as a way to protect the IArobot from infringing
on author's copyrights by making the work available as a collection (a very
different issue that what search engines do know, which is essentially index
and not archive.)
>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".
Again, you obscure the distinction between copyright status and "protected
data/content" ... I don't believe such a system of passwords should be
necessary to ensure the protection of one's copyrights. If such a system
does suddenly become necessary (or even prudent) for any piece of content
you want to put on the web, I do think that would 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.
On this we agree.
>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...
And this is where we don't. Certainly, we can never expect to stop all
infringing (after all, even Bob Dole looks like he's gonna hit with a
copyright infringement suit this week, and he voted for the current
copyright laws) ... that doesn't mean we need to expect it or encourage it.
It seems to me you consider copyright infringement "part of doing business"
on the web ... I think that's a dangerous attitude.
>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.
Agreed.... but that doesn't sound like what the IArobot will be doing. It
will be making a permenant, publicly available copy of the images from
another server without the authors consent. That's not "taking notes" and
that's not "point other users back to it." That's more like what is called
"collection" or "compilation" in other media forms (take a bunch of songs
and put them on an album, etc.) I don't believe this is as clear-cut a
situation.
>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 ??)
Nope ... because an Internet address can't be copyrighted. That is totally
outside the issue of copyrights. For example, if the IArobot were just
storing the URLs of every graphic on the Web, I think we'd have a totally
different situation that wouldn't affect copyright issues of the authors at
all. Yahoo doesn't make a copy of website and deliver that to visitors, they
point users to the website.