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

webmaster at jessicastover.com webmaster at jessicastover.com
Sat Jan 31 03:54:55 UTC 2004



JC, I would encourage you to get more familiar with the HTTP 1.1 spec with
regard to your claim of copyright infringement. I will summarize my
interpretation of a part of it here.

When someone provides HTTP content, they are agreeing to the protocols
governing the transmission of that content, which includes caching and
transformation of that content by proxy systems.

Fortunately, the spec provides for netizens to send Cache-Control headers
that can exclude their content from storage on and transformation by
proxies. These headers are outlined in the spec, so I'm not going to
detail them here. But as far as I have been able to tell, AOL is in
compliance with the Cache-Control specs.

I see it like this: Not including Cache-Control headers and claiming
copyright infringement is like publishing a novel in English and
distributing it in the U.S., but printing the copyright notice in Chinese.
Clients accessing your content must be able to understand that you do not
wish for it to be transformed; and since proxies speak HTTP, content
providers need to include the appropriate HTTP headers so the proxies
understand their wishes. Conversely, when a content provider excludes
Cache-Control headers, ISPs have free reign to handle the content and
deliver to the end user in whatever way they wish, as long as that way
falls within the HTTP 1.1 spec.

As an aside, I have a special folder on my Apache server for Jessica
Stover's website where I keep images that I don't want to be compressed by
all of these web accelerators (Earthlink and NetZero have them too, not
just AOL). In that folder's .htacccess file, I have included instructions
to send the "Cache-Control: No-Transform" header on all files requested
via HTTP within that folder; those images are not modified in any way by
the various web caching systems out there -- the end user gets the
identical image to what is stored on my server.

~ The Gunn
webmaster at jessicastover.com


> AOL is copying and redistributing the image in a new format *without the
> permission of the copyright holder* in a way that A) makes AOL money and B)
> removes protections that the copyright holder had placed on the image to
> help keep third parties from reproducing the image without permission.
>
> and in doing so:
>
> IMHO they are infringing on the copyright of those who have placed the
> digital watermark in the image.
>
> jc





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