Recent Features
| |||||||||||||
Whta's the difference between this and robots.txt?Whta's the difference between this and robots.txt?Posted Jun 4, 2009 20:00 UTC (Thu) by ncm (subscriber, #165)In reply to: Whta's the difference between this and robots.txt? by euske Parent article: Okular, Debian, and copy restrictions
What does "had to" mean, here? Corporate directive, or misplaced feeling of obligation?
The difference is that copying and pasting from a pdf is done by an individual, who can be presumed to be equipped to make the decision whether the flags reasonably apply in each case. robots.txt is read by automated programs, and is obeyed mainly because crawlers wouldn't work if they ignored it.
(Log in to post comments)
Whta's the difference between this and robots.txt? Posted Jun 5, 2009 10:34 UTC (Fri) by euske (subscriber, #9300) [Link]
No, copy-and-paste is a form of automation too. You could always type the written characters by yourself when extraction is prohibited, although it sounds stupid. Basically, both features grant access to the contents in a basic way. They just prohibit a certain kind of use of its information. Technically, of course, it doesn't make much sense, because it's easily circumventable. But it's an okay solution as long as most people follow the restriction and to follow these restriction is considered decency.
Think about it: Most people respect a "private" sign in the real world when there's no physical obstacle, so we don't have to spend huge money on security. If everyone starts ignoring these "soft" restrictions by their own discretion, the world would become much worse. Originally Adobe created this because their customers want it. But I'm pretty sure companies like Adobe might be eventually going to impose much more strict, heavy and technically ill-formed DRM scheme when the content providers demand, no matter how ridiculous or broken the idea is.
My only gripe is that the whole mechanism was made and spread by a single company without much consideration or democratic discussion, and nowadays it gets so important. But sadly, that's how most of today's format standards were created.
Whta's the difference between this and robots.txt? Posted Jun 5, 2009 15:45 UTC (Fri) by foom (subscriber, #14868) [Link] Think about it: Most people respect a "private" sign in the real world when there's no physical obstacle, so we don't have to spend huge money on security. Taking that analogy further: If you know you have the permission to enter the property marked "Private", you don't have to wait for the owner to come over and take the sign down before doing so. You can just do it. If you are crossing into the land for innocent purposes (e.g. it's a shortcut to where you're going and the land is unused, so what's the harm?) you might make the decision to enter despite it being marked private. And often that'll be fine, because likely nobody will know, and nobody was harmed. Think about it. Even when there's a chain-link-fence around some unused land (one step up from a sign on the border), how often have you seen holes in it for people to walk through? At least around here that's quite common. Both externally-granted permission and innocent infringement are quite common with software, as "in the real world". I've certainly run into both situations personally with copy-inhibited PDFs.
Whta's the difference between this and robots.txt? Posted Jun 6, 2009 5:34 UTC (Sat) by euske (subscriber, #9300) [Link]
But even in those cases, we don't publicly tout that we can infringe it, right? Going back to the PDF case, what a developer could do at best (in favor of infringement) in this case is to give an ability to do so in a somewhat obscure way, and I guess that's what the Okular people did. Blaming them publicly that they didn't make it conspicuous enough is obviously too much one-sided. This is a complex real-world problem and there's no single perfect answer, either technically or socially.
|
|||||||||||||