SHARE

Call for Vendor-Neutral E-Copyright

Tim Berners-Lee, director of the World Wide Web Consortium and inventor of the Web, spoke out late Monday against the U.S. Copyright Office’s plans to limit browser access to e-filing. Lee said the plan to offer access to online forms only to users of IE would go against a 1998 directive from the Office of […]

Written By

Susan Kuchinskas

Aug 23, 2005

Datamation content and product recommendations are editorially independent. We may make money when you click on links to our partners. Learn More

Tim Berners-Lee, director of the World Wide Web Consortium and inventor of the Web, spoke out late Monday against the U.S. Copyright Office’s plans to limit browser access to e-filing.

Lee said the plan to offer access to online forms only to users of IE would go against a 1998 directive from the Office of Management and Budget, which told government agencies to use standards developed by international standards bodies instead of setting their own standards.

The Copyright Office is in the process of setting up a system to let creators pre-register unpublished works that are being prepared for commercial distribution. On August 4, it requested public comment about whether requiring Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser for electronic registration would create difficulties.

Berners-Lee responded via an open letter that was hand-delivered to the Copyright Office and published on the W3C Web site.

”As a background to the Copyright Office’s decision to attempt to offer services over the Web without the use of standards, it is important to keep in mind the Web was born and achieved widespread use only because of a commitment to open, vendor-neutral standards,” Berners-Lee wrote.

He pointed out that the World Wide Web Consortium was formed because competition between competing browsers jeopardized broad adoption.

The proposed single-vendor pre-registration service will exclude broad classes of creators, he argued. For example, he said, the latest versions of IE are available only on the Windows platform. (The proposed system would be accessible to IE 5.1 and higher; there are such versions available for Macintosh OS X and OS 8.1 and higher.)

Moreover, according to Berners-Lee, security issues may cause users or institutions to stop using a particular browser. ”Various browsers have suffered security breaches and the response, often, is to stop using that browser either permanently or until the security bug is fixed. During that time, the user would be entirely unable to use the pre-registration system,” he wrote. ”A standards-based strategy would ensure that users can continue to access Copyright Office services, notwithstanding the transient security problems that are inevitable for any single piece of software and have plagued all of the popular browsers at one time or another.”

The U.S. Copyright Office faces an October 24 2005 deadline for implementing the online pre-registration system, which was mandated by the Artists’ Rights and Theft Prevention Act of 2005. The Office said it was not ”entirely clear” whether the system would be compatible with other Web browsers when it launched. ”Support for Netscape 7.2, Firefox 1.0.3, and Mozilla 1.7.7 is planned but will not be available when pre-registration goes into effect,” the request for comment said.

This article was first published on internetnews.com.

Huawei’s AI Update: Things Are Moving Faster Than We Think

FEATURE | By Rob Enderle,
December 04, 2020
Keeping Machine Learning Algorithms Honest in the ‘Ethics-First’ Era

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | By Guest Author,
November 18, 2020
Key Trends in Chatbots and RPA

FEATURE | By Guest Author,
November 10, 2020
Top 10 AIOps Companies

FEATURE | By Samuel Greengard,
November 05, 2020
What is Text Analysis?

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | By Guest Author,
November 02, 2020
How Intel’s Work With Autonomous Cars Could Redefine General Purpose AI

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | By Rob Enderle,
October 29, 2020
Dell Technologies World: Weaving Together Human And Machine Interaction For AI And Robotics

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | By Rob Enderle,
October 23, 2020
The Super Moderator, or How IBM Project Debater Could Save Social Media

FEATURE | By Rob Enderle,
October 16, 2020
Top 10 Chatbot Platforms

FEATURE | By Cynthia Harvey,
October 07, 2020
Finding a Career Path in AI

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | By Guest Author,
October 05, 2020
CIOs Discuss the Promise of AI and Data Science

FEATURE | By Guest Author,
September 25, 2020
Microsoft Is Building An AI Product That Could Predict The Future

FEATURE | By Rob Enderle,
September 25, 2020
Top 10 Machine Learning Companies 2020

FEATURE | By Cynthia Harvey,
September 22, 2020
NVIDIA and ARM: Massively Changing The AI Landscape

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | By Rob Enderle,
September 18, 2020
Continuous Intelligence: Expert Discussion [Video and Podcast]

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | By James Maguire,
September 14, 2020
Artificial Intelligence: Governance and Ethics [Video]

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | By James Maguire,
September 13, 2020
IBM Watson At The US Open: Showcasing The Power Of A Mature Enterprise-Class AI

FEATURE | By Rob Enderle,
September 11, 2020
Artificial Intelligence: Perception vs. Reality

FEATURE | By James Maguire,
September 09, 2020
Anticipating The Coming Wave Of AI Enhanced PCs

FEATURE | By Rob Enderle,
September 05, 2020
The Critical Nature Of IBM’s NLP (Natural Language Processing) Effort

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | By Rob Enderle,
August 14, 2020

SEE ALL
ARTICLES

Call for Vendor-Neutral E-Copyright

Susan Kuchinskas

Recommended for you...

Company

Categories

Call for Vendor-Neutral E-Copyright

RELATED NEWS AND ANALYSIS

Susan Kuchinskas

Recommended for you...

Company

Categories