Apparently some folks are in a tizzy over Google’s autolink doohickey. Phil Ringnalda pointed out a substantive difference between this thing and the Microsoft thing, SmartTags, over which everybody got their knickers in a twist when IE6 was in beta. The difference being that Google’s version is user-activated, rather than Microsoft-activated. Current versions of Office have SmartTags, and, if you want, you can enable them. I disable all of the “helpful” features of Office, so haven’t even considered enabling this one.
Now Sam Ruby points out that Mark Pilgrim‘s released a user script for Greasemonkey called Butler, which modifies Google’s pages in a variety of ways. One could assert, but one won’t, that this is not unlike Gator’s modification of things. The essential difference again is who is in control of the modification, not whether the user approved the world’s longest end-user license agreement.
In the comments at Sam’s there is discussion of reader modification of authored text, which drifts back to digital restrictions management. This compels me to bring up that, in the Anglo legal tradition, there is no such creature as an author’s moral rights in his work; that intellectual property is a legal figment; and that my altering your words for my own purposes is not the same thing, in the least, as pretending that your words are mine. Nor does that alteration attribute to you words which were not yours.
You keep on publishing things I dislike, and I’ll keep on redacting them. Where’s that black marker?
The moral rights thing, while not obviously applicable (well, unless you’re Google and at risk of being sued in the UK and France), is the only aspect of the whole tiresome argument that’s still holding my interest, though. Unfortunately, there’s not a whole lot I can find online that goes beyond “Baby’s First Three Paragraphs About Moral Rights.” From the sound of it, though, it’s only unique objects, like paintings and sculpture, where you the creator have any say about what happens in the privacy of someone’s home; for just another of millions of identical copies of text, you only have a say about redistribution, so I expect that argument to simmer down after five or six years when people grasp that some bit-twiddling on my computer doesn’t amount to a redistributed derivative work.
If I believed that moral rights in art existed, I would find again the fairly comprehensive overview of the subject that I found lo these many moons ago. But I don’t.
On the other hand, there are good manners and bad manners. The polite thing may be to respect the wishes of an author and ignore his maunderings, rather than trying to extract the pearls of wisdom from the surrounding pile of dung.