[LINK] The End of the Web as You Know It

[Ian McKellar]

On Tue, Jun 27, 2000 at 03:42:43PM +1000, richard@auscoms.com.au wrote:
> Linkers,
> 
> Help me here.  Before we start on the political debate, can anyone tell me how
> you can disable something like a screen grab?

You can't. To the same extent that you can't stop someone taking a 
photograph of the screen or copying down the text on a pad of paper.

`Copy protected' PDF files have a similar problem. There is a flag in the
file that determines if the text can be copied and the document can be
printed. Adobe Acrobat Reader honours this flag. Other PDF readers either
don't honour this flag, or their source code is available so its trivial
(for a programmer) to make them ignore the flag.

Intellectual property is a flawed concept. With the advent of cheap large
storage and cheap fast networks and hope of companies controlling their
intellectual property vanished. The problem is that the `property' analogy
doesn't translate well to information. You can't just `copy' a piece of 
land, yet thats exactly what you can do with software. Land can't be created
from nothing - there is a finite resource, yet information is the ultimate
renewable resource. As networks get even faster and storage even cheaper
I can't imagine intellectual property as we know it lasting for long.

Ian

-- 
Ian  McKellar |    Email: yakk(a)yakk.net |    Web: http://www.yakk.net/
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