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Old 04-19-2011, 11:16 PM   #38
toddos
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Join Date: May 2010
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Giggleton View Post
Would this rendering include copying some or all of a site and reposting to another site, inserting the previous site's ads for your own? This is happening continuously of course, but is it right?

I take it you are in favor of abolishing copyright? A very small percentage of the population I believe, although I have yet to take a "scientific" poll on the subject.

Congrats Calibre!

Rendering is rendering -- the act of converting the HTML markup to a visual (or audio) display. By definition of how the web works, that's the client's job. Since the client is run on the user's computer, they have full control over how that works. Is someone stealing your copyright if they use an ancient browser like IE6 to view your web page and it doesn't display the way you want? Is someone stealing your copyright when they use a screen reader to ignore all of your visual content and speak the textual content for a visually impaired user? Is someone stealing your content if they use a user stylesheet to change the background on your page to pink? Is someone stealing your content if they block your ads? (hint: the answer to all of these is "no")

I will reiterate -- the web is not paper. You don't get to control presentation on the web like you do on paper. You can try (all of the websites that try to block right-click actions, for example), but you'll fail. If you can't understand that, I seriously hope you're not a web designer. Your "repackaging" scenario is exactly what sites like Engadget, Gawker, Slashdot, etc do all day every day -- they provide summaries, perhaps some editorial comments, and a link to the original source. Users find value in aggregation, and if you think that's "stealing" content then you surely have no idea how the web works at all.

(note that the scenario I assume you were trying for, where someone lifts your entire content wholesale, repackages it on their own site claiming it's their own, without a link back to the original, is surely stealing your content. But that's not what aggregation websites do, that's not what rss readers do, and that's not what calibre does)
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