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Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the camouflaged-spamware dept.

An Anonymous Coward writes: "MSNBC.com has the latest on the controversial Smart Tags technology that got punted from Windows XP. This time it's not Microsoft doing the dirty deed, but a couple of 3rd-party companies. And they already have 500,000 users installed. I can see the lawyers salivating already."

1 of 174 comments (clear)

  1. Virtual Republication by ProfessorPuke · · Score: 5, Interesting
    This brings up an emerging legal problem that the politicians haven't quite got their teeth into yet- if the DMCA et al provide the intellectual property industry with protection against unauthorized redistribution, should it be legal to evade that restriction by moving the point of redistribution to the client side?

    These three things are illegal to distribute today:

    • A Wall Street Journal article with the ads removed, or replaced with your own ads.
    • A PNG combining the top 20 new webcomics for that day, suitable for printing.
    • A copy of StarWars ep 1 with JarJar edited out.

    Yet the author of each piece of modified content could get around that law by only giving out a program that, when run from the end-viewer's computer, uses a legally obtained copy of the unmodified content and then creates a locally modified version with the desired changes. (There are technical obstacles to applying this technique to each of those examples, but they're surmountable).

    At no point was copyright law broken- but as a software engineer will tell you, deciding which part of a system should go on the client and on the server is an implementation detail that should be decided by technical performance concerns, not legalisms about which piece of data you can copy where.

    To the end-user, the result looks exactly the same either way ("Hey! They just waved to JarJar, and kept right on walking!"), so why should one implementation be less legal than the other?

    (This situation is rather like an inverted version of the "GPL ASP loophole")