Re: websites: public vs private information?

On Tue, 30 May 2000, William S. Lovell <wsl[_at_]cerebalaw.com> wrote:
>
> On Sat, 27 May 2000, Barry Caplan <bcaplan[_at_]i18n.com> wrote:
> >
> > 'Fraid not again. Many web sites (arguably the majority of all web
> > page hits) are generated dynamically and *never* exist on the hard
> > drive or even as a whole in RAM or any other device at the location
> > of the "the other end" in the form in which they are received.
>
> 'Fraid not again again. Was there HTML code anywhere that
> "generated dynamically" that web page?

Actually, no. The HTML you receive is the end product. Programming languages (of seemingly infinite variety) are used in multi-tier applications to generate HTML and HTML fragments. ASP files are modified HTML, with other code embedded, but they are not HTML, and they are not the only way to generate HTML. CGI scripts are another common well known example which are not HTML at all.

> Given your definition of "fixation" that may be true, but like I
> said, that stuff (links or whatever) seen by whoever on whatever
> site had to come from somewhere.

Well, yes, but it is not "my" definition. I am only saying the way things are actually implemented. IAMNAL, but I am a technical manager and web developer. For instance, my company makes enterprise software for certain intranet applications that dynamically generate every page. Depending on the application, there at least 5 and maybe as many as 15 servers required to generate the page.

Anyway, sorry for the all the technical details below. But I think it is important to understand them at least at this conceptual level (and I admit it is fuzzy even for techies) before making a case that HTML is fixed in a certain place for copyright purposes.

Still (and I am writing this only after thinking hard on the issue), I can not think of a single place or time in the system where the HTML that is received at the browser is fixed in any medium - RAM, disks, or anywhere else.

Closest I can think of is that a stream of HTML may travel (via tcp/ip) protocol from some definable point of the last web server out to the internet. I guess if I monitored that port on the network I could find it there. But due to the nature of network protocols, it is both transitive (no more available to me later than yesterday's radio traffic report) and intermingled with many other tcp/ip packets that are being processed simultaneously. At the tcp/ip layer, the familiar HTML is no longer synchronous, the order of the requisite packets is scrambled by definition... it will not become unscrambled until fixed in your browser.

Even just arriving at your browser may not be enough to "fix it"... is the copyright in the messages the browser receives or the display the browser creates from the received messages. These are clearly not the same thing:

• The browser formats basic HTML (according to some input form the human user at the browser end!
• the display may come from various non-related companies -- this is how those banner ads get everywhere -- even though you only requested info from one place.
• Interaction with plugins or other data on the receiving end may be necessary before the performance is fixed. Of course, in this case, it may be transitive on the browser end too, and may never be fixed or recoverable anywhere. Might some argue that it may not be possible to say anything *ever* existed for copyright purposes in this case?

Barry Caplan
<bcaplan[_at_]i18n.com> Received on Sat Jun 03 2000 - 16:34:32 GMT