The Web Tutorials

Page Index

Frames

Chapter Index

Introduction
History
Getting Connected
Browsers
Copyright
Search Engines
HTML
Linking documents
Images
Newsgroups
Tables
Forms
Frames
Graphic crunching
Page Design
Publishing
Javascript
Free Stuff
Styles
DHTML
On-line Shopping
Internationalism
Advertising

Copyright

The fact that Netscape gives you the option to edit the page you are looking at seems to strike at the very root of the concept of copyright. However, the way the net works it is assumed that you are at the very least going to make one copy of the page you are looking at, so anyone putting their work on the web takes that in their stride. What you do with that copy at a later stage is another matter.

The browser technology insists that you copy pages to your hard disk. That has not infringed anybody's copyright. If you copy images from someone's page but use them only for your own private enjoyment, again, you have not infringed anybody's copyright. What you do with the material afterwards is quite another matter.

Copying someone else's coding probably does not constitute an infringement at all. However, people spend a lot of time writing small pieces of code to create particular effects, and companies sell bundles of such code. On the other hand there are several sites on the web created by people who enjoy creating these useful bits of code, and they allow you to freely copy that code and use it as you wish. There is usually a single simple restriction put on your use, namely, that you credit the code's creator on your page.

This raises an important point; the point that will continually raise its head in this book: identity.

It is not so much the fact that you pinch someone's else's work that is seen to matter. The important issue is: the creator wants recognition. This is something that may change over the next few years.

At the moment everything is new and wonderful, and there are the pioneers out front enjoying themselves immensely with the new medium. Getting difficult things to work is fun, and brings a great sense of achievment. It brings a good feeling to share that with others.

At the moment almost everything on the web is free. The ethos of the web has traditionally been that it is a liberating medium, which empowers its users. It is a medium which has cut out the middleman.

You have a song to sing: fine. Sing it. You don't need to find a publisher and sing it to him first. You have a tale to tell: tell it on your web page. You don't need to write a letter to the press and have it suppressed, or cut.

This ability to byepass the normal channels of communication has led to a great many fun and games. It has led to some webmasters poking fun and thumbing their nose. It has led to others gleefully publishing classified documents. Still others have found they can go public on subjects close to their heart without having to have a fortune behind them to pay for the previously necessary infrastructure.

Just look at the economics of publishing. This is something we will go into in more detail elsewhere in this work.

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All this has led to a great outpouring of previously blocked expression. This has meant that things which were previously done at great expense can now be done very cheaply, or at no measureable expense, and they can, therefore, be given away freely.

There is also a more renegade element on the web who wish to deliberately force major organisations to rethink their strategies, and their economic models, and they are deliberately putting out small programs either for free, or for a very low price. Others are actually getting hold of saleable stuff and literally giving it away.

This will no doubt continue. However, at some stage people will want to make some money out of their labours, even if they are labours of love. However, the new economic model will allow those labours to be sold for very small amounts of money.

Returning to the main issue of copyright, we have seen recently how the whole problem has brought up issues sharply different from those normally associated with copyright infringement.

A recent case has highlighted this very clearly.

In the Shetland Isles there are two newspapers, one called the Shetland Times, the other called the Shetland News. (Check which) One has been using the frame technology invented by Netscape to present their pages.

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In true web style we will now have to click on a link and make a small detour to have a look at frames.

Generally speaking you create one page and when someone accesses it via the browser it appears in the browser window. Click on a link on that page and you go to another page. What that means is that the other page replaces the former page in your browser's window.

It doesn't have to be like that. You can divide up your web page so that it contains a set of frames, and a separate web page can be displayed in each frame.

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We will deal with the creation of such pages in another section.

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Frames

The good part about frames is that if you have a complex site you can use frames to help navigation.

Supposing you have a site devoted to your company. This company sells various services. Maybe some services (say insurance) relate to houses, others to cars, and others to travel. You now have the possibility of dividing your site into three sections accessible from the home page. If each section has several sub-sections you may feel that in order for the visitor not to lose their way you will provide an easily accessible index that will be available on-screen no matter what page your prospective customer visits.

You can arrange this quite simply by dividing up your screen into two frames. One containing the index, the other containing the page you go to when you click on the link in the index. This means your index page never changes, while the other page does.

There can be some serious negative aspects to this arrangement, but for the moment let us look at it merely as a device, and see what the implications are for copyright.

You construct a page. That page contains code for the frame setup, and very little else. There is no real content in the page at all. Your setup calls content from other pages. You will have created all your relevant pages, plus a separate page called, say, listofcontents.html. This will load into the left frame which you will have set to be quite narrow. Your home page will be shown in the larger, contents frame. Your site title will be displayed in the browser's titlebar, and in the Go list in the menu.

Someone accesses your site. They see those two pages sitting comfortbaly in the two frames. They click on an item in the index and the contents frame changes to display the new page. They don't like that page, so choose another from your index, and that page replaces the previous one in the contents area. So far so good.

Supposing you have a link to another site altogether on one of your content pages. The visitor clicks on the link and your page is now replaced by the page from the outside site.

Look at the whole contents in your browser window. You are displaying someone else's page in one of your frames. That page is itself sitting in a page you set up on your site, and it is showing your site name in the titlebar. Keep clicking on the hyperlinks and the page changes, but it keeps displaying in your frame. It would appear to the casual visitor that they are not leaving your site. You have ever so slightly submerged the identity of that outside site.

We have that magic word again: identity. Whose page is it now that is sitting in your frame?

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The Shetland newspapers have a problem. One has a nice site containing frames. Some of the links in their list of contents refer to items on the other paper's site. This means they link to the other paper and that second paper's page then appears on the first paper's site.

What is going on? Is the first paper giving the second one some free advertising on its site? Is it stealing its news. Is it subtly masking its own identity, or taking on the identity of the other paper?

Let's ask slightly different questions.

Q. How is the second paper's site funded?
A. Partially by advertising.
Q. How does the second paper get it's site revenue?
A. Totally through the sale of advertising.
Q. Assuming there is a copyright infringement how do you quantify loss of earnings.
A. There are none, directly.
Q. Is anyone losing out at all?
A. The advertiser is not going to be happy that certain readers are byepassing his advertisement. He may pull out of the deal, or demand lower rates.
Q. Ah, so someone is likely to lose money?
A. Possibly.

We have here a situation where the visitor is looking at a someone's page on a different site. The topography of the external page may be such that people have to get to it via another page which contains important commercial items, such as banner ads, or some kind of sponsorship. By byepassing that page the site that has linked to the relevant page, and caused it to display in its own frame has set that routing to nought.

Hold on. Hasn't the whole question suddenly changed after that last sentence? Now we're saying that a simple link to another page on someone else's site could be causing the site owner to lose money. That is serious. After all, the whole point of the web is the way it is constructed using the Hypertext Transport Protocol. What is the most important part of this protocol, apart from its ubiquitousness? The fact that you can create links that traverse the net. If we are now saying those very links can cause copyright problems, we are, putting it bluntly, in deep shit.

This second problem is taxing the world's highest paid lawyers right now. Updates in due course.

The first problem, that caused by the frames, really turns, not so much on the links (that's the second problem), but on the old problem of identity. One site is displaying material from another site as if it was part of the material on its own site. The problem with this statement is that the visitor should know he's clicked on a link to another site. After all the address of the link, its url, is displayed clearly in the status bar at the bottom of the screen.

The matter stands unresolved at present. But it promises to be a thorny question that will need to be addressed. It is also a question that is fundamental to what the web is all about.