The Netizen community is still debating the Napster judgment which
has thrown a challenge at the technological developments which create legal
conflicts within the society. Napster represented a technology for Peer
to Peer sharing of files but has now been held guilty of contributory
Infringement of Copyrights. To what extent the legal rights of Copyright
can restrict further technological developments in the Internet arena is
being watched closely by the community.
In the meantime, a new war zone appears to be forming on the horizon
with some of the recent technological developments. The Cyber Law scene
is already full of disputes on "Caching", "Deep Linking" and "Privacy Invasion".
Some of the new developments discussed here appear to further accentuate
the concerns in this regard. We shall in particular look at three
such technologies being introduced by Kenamea, Bang Networks and
Fine Ground Networks, all US based start ups.
A San Francisco based software start-up Kenamea is developing software
that is designed to help make the Web a faster, more secure place for activities
such as conducting stock trades and running big computer programs. Kenamea
maintains the application's HTML code and data on the client device. As
a result, applications are "instant on", with no page-load time, and are
available off-line for data access and manipulation.
Bang Networks Inc. of San Francisco is also working on similar
lines. Bang for example, is tackling the problem of how web sites
can push constantly changing information to users rather than relying on
them to keep requesting pages. When a user requests a live-enabled
web page, the initial page snapshot is served as it is today using
your existing hosting or content delivery solutions. Once loaded into the
browser, however, the page silently establishes a connection with the Bang
Real-Time Network. From that point on, the network maintains the connection
as long as the page is
open.
Fine Ground Networks Inc of Campbell, has broken a new ground
in Dynamic Content Acceleration Condensation technology which is complimentary
to traditional web caching but with the capability to intelligently "condense"
dynamic content in real-time. Typically, dynamically generated web pages
that are visited frequently by a user or a group of users change only by
a few percent between successive visits. With current technology, when
any portion of a page changes the entire page must be sent afresh to the
end-user. What Fine ground tries to achieve is a caching solution that
identifies only the changes in the page and requests it from the server
while the remaining part is delivered from a cache source.
All the new technology builders have stated that they have taken
some measures to protect Privacy. However, it appears that the technology
will have a serious conflict with those who donot like "Copies of the Content
being made" without their permission. The web is already having a few examples
of web sites who are specifically barring "Links" to their sites by an
appropriate statements in their sites. Now how will they react to these
devices which openly profess to copy content to speed up Internet?.
Of course, if one accepts the legal logic behind the Napster judgment,
all offline browsers and more so the Internet Browser itself may be blamed
for Contributory infringement of Copyright.
Let's hope that the technology trends discussed above coupled with the
undisputed acceptance of offline browsers, would establish
the principle of legal tolerance in the Cyber World as regards copyright
on web content which could even reverse the Napster judgment at the earliest.
Naavi
April 5, 2001
Report
in Financial Express
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