RE: [xml-dev] Abuse of this list

["Len Bullard" <cbullard@hiwaay.net>]

That's an interesting question.  Can they abuse the list or just the
authors?  I've had posts from XML-Dev being repurposed at Stylus and online
magazines for some time now.  There have been instances of having whole
concepts lifted, phrases used as original when they are cribbed and so on.
I'd more or less accepted it because chasing a copyright violator is the
author's financial burden to bear and who can afford that?  For the most
part, I don't care enough.

Today Google's SpyTrux can prowl the streets and snap images of your 13 year
old daughter playing on the Slip and Slide in your front yard and publish
that with your street address and directions to your house.  We are told
this is legal because it isn't different from the view of any person driving
by your house.  That the image will be indexed into the world's most
accessible search engine for anyone to review isn't noticed by the paid
legal pundits for Google.  They remove the high publicity images (images of
protestors at abortion clinics), but your kids are still up there.

I warned you.  Unless local filtering is a part of the web, unless
permissions for view AND review are part of its infrastructure, it's abuse
is not only inevitable but legion.

No one cared.  Everyone was making money.  We wanted it to be as 'easy and
simple' as it could be for the programmer's so we didn't do any of the hard
work the pioneers in the hypertext field said was required to field a
socially responsible web.  Instead, we have the WWW.  We forged our own
chains.

So suck it up.  The damage is done.  Undoing it will require legislation and
you are going to protest that more than what Stylus has done, but
unfortunately, few care enough to act until the knock is on their own door.

len


From: Richard Tobin [mailto:richard@inf.ed.ac.uk] 

I see that a company called Stylus Studio is republishing xml-dev in
the form of a blog.  Fair enough.  But they are making selected words
from postings into links to their products.  So the word "downloaded"
in my announcement of LTXML2 is a link to downloading their product;
the word "manual" is a link to their manuals; the word "bugs" is a
link to their criticism of a competing product.

Modifying other people's articles in this way seems to me dishonest,
if not an outright copyright violation.