Comments on: Caching vs Copyright

By: Doug

Doug — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 15:23:54 +0000

I think Marc raises some excellent points in this article. As an attorney and an online writer myself, there is definately a concern with someone accessing or using your work without you getting compensated appropriately.

There is definately a HUGE gray area in terms of what you can and cannot access from the web and how you access it. And we, the endusers, are not the ones who will ultimately pay for a mistake in this area, it is Ilium and the developers who will be held responsible. While I would love to have fully downloaded articles, I would not ask Ilium to offer something like that with such legal implications. If they decided to offer it, I would presume that they had fully researched the law or entered into an agreement with various sites ala AvantGo.

Doug

By: Marc

Marc — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 13:50:41 +0000

Already there! Tap and hold on an article in the Headline View (where you see all the headlines for one channel).

By: Phil

Phil — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 00:08:28 +0000

Copyright not withstanding I would like to see the ability to mark a single selected article as unread! It is an easy way to keep articles for later reviw (at least until you refresh again).

You can currently mark all as read or as unread. Reading it marks it as read automatically.

Completing the object abstraction by offering a way to “unread” single articles would be most helpful to me.

By: Clinton Fitch

Clinton Fitch — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 14:39:51 +0000

Great explanation and post Marc. While I really like the idea of complete downloading of an RSS feed and caching it on my device, I must admit that it never occurred to me that there could be a copyright issue with the content.

Thanks!

Clint

By: Marc

Marc — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 14:19:54 +0000

I wish that was all there was to it. Here are the two things that must be considered when talking about copyright:

1) Will the user profit from the copying of the page?
2) Will the owner of the page lose profit as a result of the copying?

1: Will the User Profit?
YOU won’t profit but WE will. If we cache webpages will we sell more software? We probably would. Thus, we would profit by copying the copyrighted work of another.

2: Will the Owner Lose Profit
Very possibly, yes. If you are viewing pages offline with no direct internet connection the possibility of measuring visits, clicking ads, etc. all diminish. As a result the site would lose profit as a result of our page caching.

So just on those two points along, page caching becomes a real danger for us. Whether or not other people do it is secondary to whether or not it is legal.

By: Alan

Alan — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 10:03:48 +0000

There is absolutely no difference, technical, practical, legal, or moral between a ‘download’ and a ‘visit’. They are the exact same thing. Also, making a ‘copy’ of copyrighted material as part of the process of displaying it is what every browser does. You might as well suggest that looking at a copyrighted web page with a web browser is a legal gray area. The only difference between a ‘pre-fetched’ and a ‘downloaded when I click on the link’ page is that in the latter case the probability that I will look at the page is equal to one, and in the former case it is less than one. How can the probability of my looking at it or not affect the ethics of the situation? Just my opinion of course. Cheers.

By: spmwinkel

spmwinkel — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 20:26:50 +0000

Image caching and ‘mark all as read’ when leaving a feed are the only two things at my wishlist, so with one of the two coming, I’m happy!

“There is no way we are going to do anything that even comes close to violating the copyright of someone else.” Very good principle. :thumbsup:

By: Marc

Marc — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 20:00:48 +0000

THAT one I’m working on! As for release…sorry, don’t have a date yet but it is “in progress”!

By: Johan

Johan — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 19:29:13 +0000

Ok, so no page caching for now, but what about image caching? Newsbreak already grabs the images, just not when it downloads feed’s. As long as you put it as an option, most people would be happy. When is the next version of newsbreak expected? Oh, and I read the post in newsbreak!