"Larry Dighera" wrote in message
...

[snip]
It's simple; works that contain _no_ copyright notice are not
copyrighted.

This isn't correct. Ray posted a quote from the US Copyright office website
that states that copyright exists from the moment the copyrighted work is
created. All of the text posted in this newsgroup is therefore copyrighted,
even though folk rarely, if ever, attempt to protect such copyrighted
material. Certainly, though, anyone who produces copyrighted work has a
right to place restrictions on how that work can be used. Whether or not
such restrictions is enforceable is another matter.


Thank you for providing your views, the link, and information on the
issue. If the WWW is to continue to provide the wealth of information
it does currently, I see no way of overcoming the objections raised by
Mr. Hunt other than those mentioned above.


But in making such a judgement, you would be too pessimistic.

There are a thousand and one ways to accomplish just about anything in IT.
In this instance, you can, for example, create your website inside a
firewall and configure it to respond only to requests coming from a proxy
you establish outside this firewall (but protected by its own firewall which
needs to be configured to allow normal http traffic). This just makes it
more difficult to break into the site and find the coprighted material.
Then, instead of constructing the website with hard coded HTML pages
containing the links to the image files, create it using PHP or Perl or
VBScript or JScript or C++ or any of seeming countless languages that can be
used for CGI and/or ASP programming). What this, then, allows you to do is
check for the referring page/site. You then have the ability to decide,
even on a page by page basis, what to send in response to a request for an
image. There are countless security policies you can establish, and a great
many ways to try to enforce them; there are so many options it is hard to
know where to begin. You could set up your policies so that the only access
to the images is by navigating through your home page; or you could have
this as the default policy, but provide, for a subscription fee, links from
other websites directly to selected images (but this still give you the
ability to decide precisely how your material is used since you can refuse
links to certain kinds of site/pages or require prior approval of the pages
containing the link before selling a license to link to your material). You
can even go so far as to create your own Java applet that will browse links
to your images, and that can be the only browser to which your website will
send copyrighted material you want to protect. Such an applet will not have
access to the disk or the printer, and while the user could take a snapshot
of the desktop, the result would likely be a reduced quality image. While
any and every measure that can be taken to protect copyrighted material can
be defeated, it isn't that hard to make it much more expensive to violate
copyright than it is to obtain legally (or in the case of pirating images
for use in eBay auctions, much more expensive to violate copyright than the
seller can reasonably hope to get from the auction). That is, in fact, the
best you can hope for. But of course, you face costs (in terms of hardware
on which to run the proxy, and extra routing hardware, and in terms of
programming cost, which may be the most significant expense unless you know
how to do it yourself), and the visitors to your website may pay some cost
(e.g., in the case of using a Java applet, those running Windows XP and
later will have to download and install the Java runtime because MS no
longer ships it with Windows). So you end with a cost/benfit analysis for
both the copyright owner and the pirate: in both cases, a judgement needs to
be made, is the effort/cost justified by the benfit/profit that can be
realized.

HTH

Cheers,

Ted