> > I'd let the content providers decide what they think is fair
> > use of their materials,
>
> In the US, the UK, and doubtless many other jurisdictions, this is
> completely wrong. The _law_ defines what is fair use, not the content
> provider.
>
The law may well determine limits on what is fair use, but surely it doesn't
go so far as to specify all of the details of, e.g. license agreements for
software, and it can not mandate that an author make his work available for
free. All I am suggesting here is that if an author wants the best
copyright protection I can provide, then he can have it, and if he wants to
make some portion of his work more freely available, then that is his right
because he owns the copyright on his materials (and I am not interested in
making an arrangement to acquire for myself the copyright for materials that
a content provider provides) and I'd do what I can to support it. I would,
in a sense, be providing a service both to content providers, or authors,
and to their intended market.
> > > 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.
>
> In books, you have the "first sale" doctrine. After I pay for a book, I
> can do what I like with it - keep it, give it away, burn it. Surely after
> a user has paid for your content, they should (again, in analogy with
> books) be allowed to do what they like with one copy of it, as long as
> they don't break copyright law by reproducing it.
>
You also have libraries. Any univeresity library I have used has had
external readers who pay an annual fee for borrowing priviledges. In this
model, you pay a fee for access to the material, but the material never
becomes your property. I am not looking at establishing a virtual bookstore
where people can buy ebooks. Rather a virtual library with annual fees
would be a much better description, where the client pays for access to
information, rather than paying for the information itself.
So, I am not selling the content, but rather for access to it, in a manner
analogous to annual library fees paid by external readers for borrowing
priviledges at may academic libraries. I'll leave it to someone else to
establish virtual bookstores vending ebooks.
>
> I believe applets can be signed, and if you have control of the browser
> you could distribute the required certificates with it. This would disable
> the security model for applets you approve.
>
OK, so that is something to investigate further.
> It is indeed easy to write DLLs in C, but getting Mozilla to download them
> and load them itself will take work. And be a security hole unless you are
> careful.
>
Ah, but I would not have Mozilla load them. That would be handled by the
application into which I embed it. The principle trick will be to have
Mozilla tell my application the filename of the DLL that has been
downloaded. Once I know how to do that, the rest is relatively easy. And
since I would be using only DLLs I create, and these, by design will be
small and simple, the security risk ought to be minimal. Under no
circumstances would I be using DLLs created by someone else for this
purpose.
> > > 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).
>
> As I understand it, the DOM is a generalised API for access to a tree - in
> Mozilla's case, an XML one. In which case, the only need to extend it
> would be to perform operations on the tree that the current standard
> didn't permit or hadn't thought of. I think most ops one could possibly
> use are now in - can you give an example of how you might want to extend
> it?
>
No, not off hand. I can hardly do that until I come up against a problem
that can not be easily handled by what is already available. I a sense, I
am like a novice C++ programmer asking if the capability is there for me to
create my own libraries. Yes, there is no pressing need to extend the C++
language, but that is a different question from whether or not there is the
possibility of creating your own libraries. Similarly, I see he question of
extending the DOM as one of creating an additional library of my own, and
like C++ libraries, would likely consist of combinations of statements
involving ops available in the language and functions in the standard
libraries.
So the question remais, not is it useful to extend the DOM, but "Can it be
done?"
Cheers,
Ted
