Annotations: A Cause of Controversy

Written June 15. 1999, at 06:00 GMT.

A Wired article dubs annotations as The Web's New Graffiti and tells how a number of companies are considering to sue Third Voice for copyright infringement and for supporting slander (largely because Third Voice stores the annotations in their own database). The companies demand to have the ability to opt-out of annotations. Any such action would certainly affect projects like Crit.

Their argument is that Third Voice is modifying an intellectual property by downloading the unmodified document and then rewriting it in memory before it is rendered on the screen. Crit essentially does the same thing, except the rewriting happens on their (proxy) server, and is sent from there to the user.

The counter-argument is that modifying the digital object is an informed choice made by the user in the sole purpose to conduct a discussion (seperate from the IP in question) with other people.

This seems to be a natural hostile reflex to new technology by companies that are use to having a monopoly of sorts (is "monopoly on content presentation" a phrase?). This only goes to show how stupid/dangerous the IP idea is (just add Crit) (especially for digital objects). When will the IP droids (just add Crit) stop? If I can't view their content through an annotation browser/viewer, am I then free to view their site with images turned off? or in the lynx browser? or on a black and white monitor? or with my stereo playing in the background...?

My opinion is that how I view a page is no one's business but my own, and if they wish to avoid public discussion, they should keep them hidden from the big bad open world.

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