I guess he means "not allowing people to read/share/copy a book is like keeping people as slaves".

This sounds like "the content wants to be free".

After all, it makes sense to have some ability to control our own work. The problem is that instead of just assuring people don't get robbed, the congress usually gives *AA sort of a license to kill.

We need more examples that making a move does not mean being under the MPAA umbrella, does not mean using DRM, and does not mean "bittorrent is evil".

This is going to give "Copyrighted stuff can't be copied" people a hard time...

All material on this site is released under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license.

Although the movie is not directly hosted on its site (or is it?), maybe it's also under BY-NC-SA.

Not only could the OP just grab the video and convert it to DVD, he could distribute it too! (The only bottleneck being MPEG patents.) No need to feel guilty for sharing a version for your beloved movie player gadget!

Won't this just catch the ones who plan their attacks with no encryption?

Also, even if it catches those, isn't the internet a little big to filter without getting overloaded with stuff to analyse? Unless everyone starts using ASCII youtube, I suppose...

But surely, this gives potential to the idea of fake alerts to make sure security forces will be somewhere else waiting for an attack, while the real one happens on their backs.

The problem is that, AFAIK, the DMCA not only forces you to comply (I suppose if it is really illegal, you get into trouble if you don't comply, instead of waiting for fair judgement from a court of law), but it also considers a link to something illegal to be illegal by itself.

So, google is hosting links, it's just that.

As said by others, this would force the proprietary version to be released under the GPL.

Now, about how much better that is, it would allow you get the newest version and strip off any bloatware. Instead of just forking, you could maintain kind of a parallel fork, stripping each new release, or incorporate useful enhancements in Beef TACO.

The GPL would forbid the proprietary version.

I guess this'd be more useful as a long-term improvement (if we ever want that, what's next? M-x bbdb on your dishwasher?) than as a "change NOW" move — people who need new equipment will buy it, others can continue using the older ones.

Now, this kind of solution probably would be as useful for aware people as antivirus with "permanent protection" are for people who understand how to stay away from viruses.

That one day is 1969-10-29, right?

I mean, the danger was always there, it's more a feature than a design error.

You can always trust an archive, or at least write a "fetch timestamp", when writing serious stuff, like wikipedia articles. (Anyway, an URL bibliography item should always say when it was fetched.)

I don't know if, on the other hand, by linking smaller portions of data, we aren't making it easier to find and track that kind of changes.

It is hard to read a hundred-paragraph document to track 3 or 4 pieces of data. On the other hand, if those 3 or 4 pieces are independent links, with descriptive names, you might need nothing else to guess what should be written in the linked resource, "Uh, link `we-are-at-war'. Oh wait, it now says we never were at war...".

That won't happen, there's HTTP 3xx. Of course if you move or discontinue something, you'll use those.

(Now seriously, if something disappears and you can't fix it, then there's nothing else you can do (other than removing the link). On one hand this is sad, but on the other hand it's this interdependence that makes web great.

Are HTML named anchors an example of data-naming? At least some browsers will render a resource around an anchor, if its name is given in the URL.

Applied to the web (and with a way to join two pieces of data) this can lead to a HTML-supported bottom-up approach, with no need for "a special way to #include files". People could then create welcome.html-piece, toc.html-piece, blogpost.html-piece and say index.html is *.html-piece.