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• I have a right to install software on my computer that alters the content i access and view in any way i want, as long as i have permission to view that content in some form.
• Third Voice has a right to maintain a database where people can comment on various URLs for purposes of commentary or critisism. The fact they display the comments on top of the webpages being commented on makes no difference*, as long as the customers are either clearly aware of what is original content and what is 3rdvoice content or have consented to having the content altered for them. (Yes, of course, the fact KaZaA customers were not fully aware of what it meant that TopText was being installed, or informed during the installation process what the yellow links would mean in future makes everything different, and makes the inclusion of TopText with the KaZaA program, whether legal or no, definitely immoral on the part of KaZaA.)

Gotta watch that "fair-use" stuff... it's extremely limited and does not refer to modification at all. You have the right to quote small snippets in a academic context, parody, and a couple of other small things, but it does not extend to arbitrary modification.

Both systems would be an end-user activity that adds value, in the user's mind, to the information already present in the website.

First, there is no "right" to add value to somebody else's copyrighted work. If your use isn't covered under the extremely limited fair-use clauses and you don't have permission, you are legally out of luck.

The changes are not made on the server, they're made in the browser. Just because Opera allows you to zoom a page, is it violating fair use? No. A website delivers you some information, either free, or in exchnage for something (money, advertising data, etc.). At that point, as long as you're not duplicating it for others, it's yours. You can feed it through a program to do word-count analysis, you can feed it to a translation program, you can feed it to a program which shows you how it looks to people with color-blindness or other vision impairments, you can insert your own commentary on the page, you can rot13 it, encrypt it, delete it, etc. Copyright is about copying. If the information is delivered to you in a physical form (like a newspaper), you can destroy it, give it to someone else, etc., as long as you're not copying it.

In fact, the web gives you even more options: if the server permits, you can fetch the page through another server which translates for you, or processes the page to show you how it looks to a color-blind person. You used to be able to have whole collections of commentary on web pages, but the commentary was so useless that there's no money in it...

What Microsoft is doing is creating a filter in the users' browsers which adds complementary information. In theory (in other words, ignoring monopoly practices and considerations), users have every right to use that browser to perform that task, or to choose a different browser, to perform other information-processing tasks.

They shut down on April 2, 2001.

In all these cases, the actual web pages are never touched; they are simply annotated on the client side. I don't recall there being any law against a user agent modifying an HTML page when it is displayed. I'm sure if corporations had their way, they wouldn't allow me to use my own stylesheet to view their pages (an option in both IE and Netscape); but I still can, because HTML was never intended to strictly control how content is displayed. If a user agent wants to intersperse every page with links to it's producer's web, well, why not? It may be annoying, but there's nothing illegal or even immoral about it.

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Sounds like a massive commercialization of the (apparently now-defunct) Thirdvoice software that raised such a ruckus a couple years ago. Perhaps Thirdvoice has some patents on the idea which Microsoft is infringing.

Uh oh! If I'm anti-patent and anti-Microsoft, which of my principles do I set aside today?

If you want to do some lucrative IT contracting in Europe check out Freelance HQ. It's a sort of Third Voice for IT contractors. It has reviews by contractors where they report hourly rates broken down by sector and country. If you want to know which O'Reilly books to buy they have level of demand for each skill (Visual Basic, SQL Server, Oracle, Access and C come out top). They currently have 284 agencies and 541 contracts on file. It also gives information about contractors' age and sex (almost all male, half of them are in their 30s). Germany seems to come out pretty well. And it's interesting that the biggest agencies suck ass, as they're often late on payments and judged to be dishonest.

Here's a description from Micro Star v. Formgen Inc.:

*fn4 A low-tech example might aid understanding. Imagine a product called the Pink Screener, which consists of a big piece of pink cellophane stretched over a frame. When put in front of a television, it makes everything on the screen look pinker. Someone who manages to record the programs with this pink cast (maybe by filming the screen) would have created an infringing derivative work. But the audiovisual display observed by a person watching television through the Pink Screener is not a derivative work because it does not incorporate the modified image in any permanent or concrete form. The Game Genie might be described as a fancy Pink Screener for video games, changing a value of the game as perceived by the current player, but never incorporating the new audiovisual display into a permanent or concrete form.

(I had these cites handy because I've been waiting to see the same misguided challenge raised against ThirdVoice or my poky annotation engine for offering web page annotation.)

Consider the ideas of collaborative reviewing and scoring, along with third-party annotations like like what Third Voice does. Imagine a "moderated" WWW...

You can't just go into a store and deface thier packaging like that. We need a legal method to get the word out.

You know what this reminds me of? It reminds me of 3rd-party web annotations, like Third Voice. We need something like Third Voice for Real Life stuff. Maybe some day when someone is walking down the isle of a store while wearing their cybergoggles, warning messages from third parties will pop up whenever they look at SDMI products. :-)

Actually, we also need something like Third Voice, but with an open and documented protocol (so that it can be implemented on all platforms), collaborative filtering so you can skip over whatever B1FF says, and enabled by default on all web browsers. Hm...

crit.org has had universal web annotation for a while now... but that didn't stop Third Voice from claiming they were the first earlier this year. The first proprietary one, perhaps.

[TMB]

But! I spent some time reading their "forum" section. This is a truly frightening place; there seem to be three or four posts daily asking for corroborative links, which are responded to by "avatars" flaming the bejeezus out of the querant. I'm bothered by this; I'm so used to /.'s freewheeling, the-ones-that-know-tell-everyone-else-what-the-rea l-deal-is nature of slashdot forums. The conscensus of this /. forum is to dismiss it; this is a joke or publicity stunt. In fact it isn't. These guys take themselves very seriously, and are openly hostile to any and all references to actual (peer-reviewed) research.

Ask Ed Gehrman what he's experienced with this site. He's posted several comments on their site, but then gets childishly (and publicly) ridiculed by the maintainers of the forum, not on the merit of his posts, but the size of his genitalia, literacy, family, etc. This from the supposed CS/EE's, makers of Tommorow's Tommorrow's Technology who can't even spell "teraherz" or "dialectrics" (sic).

I sent Ed a link to Third Voice, and did a touch of debunking myself. If we all went to the site & tore apart their claims, perhaps we can rescue the idiots who're listening to their claims (and sending $$ and equipment to further research, believe it or not. I saw the posts on the forum today).

Anyway, that's my perfect scenario, now that this snake oil operation as once again resurfaced on /.: what if 1000's of /.ers descend on their little party armed with facts and reason... "what a wonderful world it would be..."

So go forth, my fellow Knights of Reason and Heroines of Truth (or vice/versa :) ). Take up your expertise, your passion, your wit, and take these goons to task! Yield no quarter, take no prisoners, kick ass, forget names, and have fun with it!

jaz 'guevera'

You got it pally. The Linux community is nothing if not responsive.

Yes, all you Linux-lovers out there, we've got what you've been waiting for all this time! Run, don't walk to freshmeat.net and download BSOD-0.01.i386.rpm! Simply type rpm -ivh BSOD-0.01.i386.rpm and Blammo! Your once-reliable server will intermittently crash, displaying the famous Blue Screen Of Death you've longed for since you got that Red Hat 6.0 CD! But we haven't left the linux way behind, oh no! This puppy is ultra-customizable! Won't the guy in the next cubicle be jealous of your Mauve Screen Of Death? I hear the Khaki Screen of Death is all the rage in Paris! Next time your kernel panics (don't hold your breath) you'll be crashin' in style!

Good thing (for him) the PHBs don't have 3V, huh?

jaz