4 ms·

Ugh. For the last time. A hyperlink is not a special kind of descriptor. You could very easily write a browser plug-in that would take addresses of the form:

by rsync 11y ago

Ugh. For the last time. A hyperlink is not a special kind of descriptor. You could very easily write a browser plug-in that would take addresses of the form: "there is a website on the Internet that is named example.com and on the server upon which example.com runs, there is a directory named /files, within which there is a regular file named index.html". See ? So it's just speech. It's not special speech, it's not interesting speech, it's not strange computer speech. It's just plain old speech. I have been trying, for 14 years[1][2] to erase this distinction with the thought experiment of the "natural language hyperlink" and I had hoped that this "issue" would just disappear. Do I really have to write that plug-in ? Really ? [1] http://slashdot.org/story/02/02/06/1559237/slashback-playstation-cuecat-games http://slashdot.org/story/02/02/06/1559237/slashback-playsta... [2] http://www.kozubik.com/published/decisions.txt http://www.kozubik.com/published/decisions.txt

germanier 11y ago
That's exactly the point. I would be very surprised if the court would see a difference between your description and an a-tag. But your description might still aid copyright infringement and it's the question whether the speaker should be liable for that or not. If I'm standing on the market square and reading today's newspaper out loud that is just speech. But it's also copyright infringement. This case has nothing to do with the specific form of a link. The question is whether one can infringe copyright by giving a very specific (and automatically executable) description on how to do so.