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I've seen a fair number of mails to mailing lists in the past few days from people wanting to publish stuff on the 'net, but not let people copy it - both text and images. This is driving me spare; some of these people are working on the 'net for five, six years, and it's plain that they just don't get it.
If I see something on the 'net - anywhere, the web, usenet, email, wherever - my machine has already made a copy of it. It is there, on my screen, on my machine. The internet is not some magic portal through which one can look but not touch - it works, all the time, by making copies. Once it is on my machine, you can't take it back. You can make it difficult for me to keep it, but you can't make it impossible, and it's fairly likely that you'll only piss me off by trying. Indeed, there's a fair argument that showing it to other people at all causes them to make a copy of it in their own heads - this isn't so clear for images or long text, but if you've written a short poem, I defy you to show it to people and not have them memorise it if they want to.
If you do not want people to have copies of your work, you can not place it on the internet - in fact, you're better off not showing it to anyone, ever. Keep it secret. Keep it safe.
If I see something on the 'net - anywhere, the web, usenet, email, wherever - my machine has already made a copy of it. It is there, on my screen, on my machine. The internet is not some magic portal through which one can look but not touch - it works, all the time, by making copies. Once it is on my machine, you can't take it back. You can make it difficult for me to keep it, but you can't make it impossible, and it's fairly likely that you'll only piss me off by trying. Indeed, there's a fair argument that showing it to other people at all causes them to make a copy of it in their own heads - this isn't so clear for images or long text, but if you've written a short poem, I defy you to show it to people and not have them memorise it if they want to.
If you do not want people to have copies of your work, you can not place it on the internet - in fact, you're better off not showing it to anyone, ever. Keep it secret. Keep it safe.
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I know information wants to be free, but speaking as someone who has a website (www.dublinstories.org) dedicated to digital storytelling, I'd be mightily pissed if someone copied a story off the site, whether it be a copy of it, or someone stealing the story and putting in their name. It's mean for Dublinstories, not anywhere else...unless they ask me first.
I really must get a Creative Commons licence on the site or something like that.
Speaking of Dublinstores, didya read my last weblog posting? Eep!
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Besides, the desire to receive credit for the creation of something is a different matter to preventing people from making a copy - I'm fairly sure you don't mind someone printing out something from Dublinstories and hanging it on their wall, for instance.
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Personally, I don't see the point - after all, if the image is on your screen, then it is almost certainly in your cache, so even if they have disabled "right-click, save picture as", you can probably find the .jpg in your cache and if you are really desparate to copy, there is always Shift-Print Screen (or equivalent on non-Windows PCs). I know - when I was creating the training courses for Hong Kong, the only images I had of some products were in PDF files that couldn't be hacked, so the only way I could get an image into PowerPoint was to do a screen capture, edit and clean up in Photoshop and save as a JPEG.
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What scares me isn't the rank (and I mean that in a few senses of the word) amateurs trying dumb tricks. It is the big companies that try to copy protect CDs, and then sue people for letting the world know that holding down the shift key when you put the CD in will bypass the copy protection.
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+
Flamethrower
=
Better world to live in.
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