All of the schemes under discussion are like locks on your door - they only keep honest people honest.

And, if I might add, it's better to think of the Web as a 1960s commune with the doors off the hinges and maybe just bead curtains covering the doorways. It's very easy to walk from room to room (page to page, site to site), share stuff (info), but a downside is how far people might take advantage of the "sharing". A 1960s commune dweller might have had no restraint about using anything you owned, including your toothbrush. :-D Even if a person living in a house doesn't lock their doors in a community, society doesn't allow some stranger to walk in and take belongings. And if people decide to live together, society strongly suggests that we don't leave out valuables if we don't trust the people who live with us. Web and informational ethics, unlike communes, means we all have to respect each other's "stuff" whether or not anyone uses "locks" on the doors. But if you have info or pictures that you want to keep 100% safe and the web has no fool-proof "locks", the better thing is to not put the stuff on the Internet. Instead, save it in a box or pass it to someone in the family with instructions to keep it off the Internet. Judy On Fri, Dec 18, 2009 at 4:52 PM, Jeff Owens <owensj@epix.net> wrote: > All of the schemes under discussion are like locks on your door - they > only keep honest people honest. > > > -------------------------------

At 04:52 PM 12/18/2009, Jeff Owens wrote: >All of the schemes under discussion are like locks on your door - they >only keep honest people honest. and At 01:58 PM 12/19/2009, Jeff Owens wrote: My point was not to nit pick at what level or what act copyright infringement might be defined to begin. My use of the adjective honesty was meant to describe in a metaphorical way that if someone will decide to violate copyrights in a some material way, such as using protected works for a commercial gain or even falsely claiming to be the author of stolen work, then what is left is only remedy at law. Hence, if you lock your door and someone breaks in, your recourse is the police and courts. If someone is 'dishonest' and motivated so, no lock is breakproof. And if using someone else's material outside the rules isn't theft by a dishonest person, I guess I don't know what is wrong with it then. --------------------- I can only presume you are referring to the previous threads about disabling right click which has nothing to do with copyright. Reviewing the posts about disabling right click, I don't see any claim for copyright of the the material for which right click had been disabled. That is not to say it is or is not copyrighted, but the copyright status is irrelevant to this discussion. So I am unclear as to why you would try to introduce copyright as an issue. Even if the material *is* copyrighted, you have downloaded a copy to your hard drive when you access the page. That is the only way your browser can display the page for you to view. Single copies for personal use are not copyright infringement. Saving that copy to another location on your hard drive for later access and review is not copyright infringement anymore than was the initial download to your temporary internet files. What I and several others have pointed out is that "disabling right click" is a minor inconvenience but a major irritant to your site visitors. It doesn't "lock" any doors or prevent anyone from saving a copy of text and/or images to a permanent location on their hard drive. Doing so is not dishonest. Doing so is not copyright infringement, regardless of the copyright status of the saved material. Pat Asher

Pat Asher wrote: So I am unclear as to why you would try to introduce copyright as an issue. > > Even if the material *is* copyrighted, you have downloaded a copy to > your hard drive when you access the page. That is the only way your > browser can display the page for you to view. Single copies for > personal use are not copyright infringement. Saving that copy to > another location on your hard drive for later access and review is not > copyright infringement anymore than was the initial download to your > temporary internet files. > > What I and several others have pointed out is that "disabling right > click" is a minor inconvenience but a major irritant to your site > visitors. It doesn't "lock" any doors or prevent anyone from saving a > copy of text and/or images to a permanent location on their hard drive. > Doing so is not dishonest. > Doing so is not copyright infringement, regardless of the copyright > status of the saved material. > > I was making an assumption as to the motivation of why someone would even think of disabling right click, or any other scheme to prevent copying material for the casual user, especially on a genealogy web site. If your intent of copying material from the internet is to somehow indulge in an act which is copyright infringement, then my analogy to 'theft' or 'dishonesty' certainly does apply. I have sent you a separate message off list to further explain what I was trying to indicate by using my little story about locks only keeping honest people honest. What I meant was, if someone has in mind an act which is defined as copyright infringement, then they will find a way to do so. I wasn't referring to any method you or anyone else is using to view or utilize genealogy material found online. I TOTALLY agree that disabling right click, or any other method to foil easy usage of a genealogy web site is a major irritant, and violates the spirit of sharing such info. Jeff Owens > > > >