"Gervase Markham" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
[EMAIL PROTECTED]">news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]...
> > materials. I want to allow content developers to use technologies like
Java
> > applets, JAVASCRIPT, dHTML, &c,
>
> Content developers then could, of course, write ways to save content into
> their Java and JavaScript. I take it you have control of all content?
>
No, but if the content developer wants to do something that makes it easy
for others to copy their work, that is their right. It is, however, the
right of those who wish to maintain as much control over the distribution of
their work that I wish to try to protect as much as possible.
> > and not have any way built into the browser
> > that would allow a user to save the developers' work to disk, view the
> > source, or print it out ( a user should have no need for doing so since
the
> > material would all be readily accessable on the web from a website I
intend
> > to develop).
>
> What happens if their web connection goes down? Or if they are in Europe,
> and pay per minute for net access? What if they want to work with the data
> on a train? Incorporate it into a report for their boss? How about a
> presentation? Maybe they want to put it in a spreadsheet to rearrange it
> in some way...
>
If their web connection goes down, I suppose they must just try again when
it comes back up, just as if there is an ice storm, one refrains from going
to the library (unless one is suicial) until the weather improves. If that
happens too often, they ought to switch to a moe reliable ISP. If they pay
per miute for access, that is too bad, but I'd bet that it would still be
much less expensive to access my site than it would be to actually buy the
same amount of information in technical reference books. And if they are on
a train, it is rather difficult to get into the nearest library (unless you
know of trains that are better equiped than any I have seen.
There are always limits to everything we do, and I can't control everything.
But I'll not use that as an excuse to make it easy to violate copyright. It
would be catastrophic for both the conent providers and me if it was
trivially easy for our protected materials to be copied and placed on a
pirate website: that would deny us our right to control the terms under
which our materials are used and infringe on our rights to be paid for the
work we do. I'd let the content providers decide what they think is fair
use of their materials, and if they want to provide a means for users to
extract some of their information to be placed in whatever document the
reader wishes, that is up to the provider, not the reader.
> > objective here is to make it much harder and much more expensive to
violate
> > my copyrighted materials than it is to get access to them legally.
>
> Is it not a legal grey area? If you take their data, process it and
> re-present it, I think the user has a strong case that they retain the
> copyright on the "new" version of their data. But this is a digression.
>
But if the content provider wants to make his content easily available, that
is his right. The user of that content has no such right unless assigned by
the content provider. A suitable metaphore would be that of books. The
person who would be paying for access to any onformation on my site would be
in the position of a book lover, while the content provider would be in the
position of the author. So the legal issue here is relatively clear. In
this context, I am not taking a person's data and processing it and
redisplaying it to the user.
> > I know I can do most, if not all, of what I want to do using the activex
> > control from MS that uses the guts of IE. The question is can I do what
I
> > need to do with mozilla?
>
> Mozilla can be embedded as an ActiveX control; however if you do this, you
> are restricting yourself to the Windows platform.
>
If I can do this, then I should also be able to embed it in a plain DLL or
even in a monolithic exe. Right? But even with using an ActiveX control,
I'd be no worse off that I would be with the activex control for IE.
> > And what would the implications of it being open source be for my
project?
> > Since I am concerned with copyright security, I do not want to make my
> > source code available.
>
> You have to make the source available of any modifications you make to
> files you get from the Mozilla project. If the files are all your own
> work, you can keep them secret. However, mozilla.org would encourage you
> to contribute as much of your work as you feel able back to the project
> :-)
>
If I find I have come up with something that would be useful to the mozilla
project, I would not hesitate to contribute. I am, afer all, benefitting
from being able to access it. And as long as I can control the user
interface using my own code, I would probably not be modifying the files
from mozilla. But I will not know for certain until I see the code.
> > Another thing I want to do is make single use statistical analysis and
> > environmental modelling applications in the form of DLLs, which, once a
> > suitable fee (of the order of $5 to $20, depending on the analysis it
does),
> > the user would download, and then it could be run once by being loaded
> > dynamically by the browser, run, unloaded, and then deleted by the
browser.
>
> Surely you want a Java applet?
>
No, a) because I am not too impressed by Java, and b) because it's securty
model is not supposed to have access to the client hardware and the programs
I am considering need to be able to read data from the client's drive, write
results to the client's drive and optionally be able to print. Now, it may
well be that he security model for Java applets has been made more flexible
since last I used it, but it is farily easy to write DLLs in C++ and load
and unload them dynamically.
> I think you may have problems with the security model if you want to get
> Mozilla to download arbitrary unfettered code to incorporate into itself,
> but I'm no expert on these things.
>
Actualy, all mozilla would need do is download the DLLs I create (I would be
the only person developing these DLLs, so I'd have complete control over
what they do) to a specific location, and let the application in which I
have embedded it know what the file name is, and than it would be my code
that loads the DLL, runs it, and then unloads and discards it once the
analysis is complete.
> > With reference to dhtml, I may wish to extend the document object model,
for
> > use with dhtml pages on my website. Would I be able to handle that
using
> > mozilla?
>
> In what way? Does the current DOM not serve your needs?
>
That remains to be seen. In a sense, what I am asking is analogous to a C++
programmer considering whether or not he can create his own library of
functions and classes. I know that by extending the IDocHostUIHandler
interface for the IE activex control, I can extend the DOM. I won't know in
what ways I will want to extend it until I examine it in more detail, but it
would be good to know if I can do the same with mozilla (and like IE, do so
without messing with the browser's own code).
> > Finally, is, or will there be, a version of mozilla for Linux?
>
> Mozilla compiles on approximately 15 platforms at last count, including
> Windows (all versions from 95 upwards), MacOS and Linux. See
Terrific. So if Linux eventually gets significant market share, I'll be
able to adapt to that without too much pain.
Thanks Gerv
Cheers,
Ted
