AOL web troubles.. New AOL speedup seems to be a slowdown

Benjamin Chase chasecentral at icehouse.net
Fri Jan 30 05:34:25 UTC 2004


I am certainly not trying to make the point that anyone taking part in using
web accelerators is violating a copyright by viewing content that is not
necessarily in the original form, but I've been witness to a few discussions
on several prominent (photo.net, etc) websites where the issue was being
raised that the act of the parent company (in this case AOL) collecting
images on their proxy and redistributing them to their users (in a new form,
recompressed) pretty much negates any digital watermarking present in an
image.

Am I concerned about it personally?  Not at all.  Since I shoot primarily
35mm transparency film, I have a physical original of a piece of work, and
if I needed to prove an image was really mine, then I would produce the
physical copy.

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-nanog at merit.edu [mailto:owner-nanog at merit.edu] On Behalf Of
Chris Parker
Sent: Thursday, January 29, 2004 9:16 PM
To: nanog at merit.edu
Subject: RE: AOL web troubles.. New AOL speedup seems to be a slowdown


At 09:57 PM 1/29/2004, Benjamin Chase wrote:

>I'm quite surprised that many professional photographers haven't spoken out
>against this, as a few issues arise as a result of this:
>
>1 - Potential sales MAY be lost as a result of the degradation of quality.
>2 - Ineffective digital watermarking.
>
>One could make the argument that since AOL has such a large share of the
>online market, that by deliberately modifying imagery (especially
>commercial) in such a way, they are doing a disservice to sites that are
>very reliant on the quality of their imagery. (Getty, Corbis, etc.)
>
>An issue could also be raised about storing and reproducing (via proxy and
>ART compression) a copyrighted work without explicit permission.

Other than AOL, the current batch of dialup accelerators that work through
a lossy compression scheme give the user control over image quality ( by
providing a 'slider' bar to select preferred quality vs. speed tradeoff ).
In addition, they work well with the browser ( IE ) so you can click on
an image and get a menu option 'reload at high quality'.  Thus you can view
the original unaltered image if you want.

Additionally, ( again I can't speak for whether AOL does this ), it's very
clear to the user what is going on, as there's a program that is installed,
that they can turn on or turn off as they wish.  As an end-user of dial-up
at home, I use a 'web-accelerator' and it does exactly what I want.  I
can load web pages faster, and if I want to see the high quality original
image of the CNN story, I can.

Am I violating a copyrighted work if I don't clean my glasses or monitor
and thus see an 'altered form' of an image?  I don't think so.  It is not
resent to anyone else in the altered form, and the user viewing the altered
form has made a concious decision to view it that way.  Alternatively, if
the original image is 1600x1200 resolution, and I shrink it to fit on my
1024x768 image in an image viewer, I don't think you could argue I'm
transgressing copyright boundries there either.

-Chris
--
    \\\|||///  \          StarNet Inc.      \         Chris Parker
    \ ~   ~ /   \       WX *is* Wireless!    \   Director, Engineering
    | @   @ |    \   http://www.starnetwx.net \      (847) 963-0116
oOo---(_)---oOo--\------------------------------------------------------
                   \ Wholesale Internet Services - http://www.megapop.net







More information about the NANOG mailing list