Amy Alexander on Thu, 18 May 2000 12:34:48 +0200 (CEST) |
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[Nettime-bold] Dialectizer closes; a victim of the Corporate Napster Bandwagon? |
Regarding today's slashdot story at http://slashdot.org/articles/00/05/17/1240227.shtml The Dialectizer (http://rinkworks.com/dialect/) project dynamically translates web pages into alternate "dialects", such as "redneck" or "Swedish Chef." In his notice at http://rinkworks.com/dialect/notice.shtml , the author discusses why he's been forced to effectively shut down the site for now, due to intellectual property threats from Bank of America and others. Apparently Bank of America used the term "contributory copyright infringement" in their accusation of what he was committing. Hmm... isn't that the same sort of sin Napster et al have been committing? It's a great corporate-legal catch-all; could of course be used to go after the makers of VCR's, copy machines, and probably people who have photographic memories. But, let's look at what Dialectizer does. It parodies (dialects, web language, etc...) The author gives his explanation of the humor, lest someone accuse it of being discriminatory at http://rinkworks.com/dialect/discrim.shtml There is clearly no way anyone is going to mistake his "dialectized" pages with the originals. Now, lets look at the AltaVista Babelfish translation engine. (http://babelfish.altavista.com). As far as I can figure out, Babelfish would seem to have less of a legal leg to stand on than Dialectizer. Babelfish, after all, translates web pages into languages other than that which they were written in, without the owner's permission, and they often come out as ridiculous as Dialectizer, but sometimes more disturbing. (For example, I've seen Babelfish confuse "colorful" with "colored" and turn a newspaper story about colorful baseball players into one about colored players.) Babelfish can't claim Fair Use as a parody, and there's a far greater risk of people confusing Babelfish's translations with the originals than there is with Dialectizer. So, are the folks at Babelfish/Altavista, who would seem also guilty of "contributory copyright infringement," shutting down their service under legal threat? Doubtful... they must have a legal team to scare away the boogey men; I don't suppose the guy at Dialectizer does. -amy ---------------------------------------------------------------------- "The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." -John Gilmore, I think _______________________________________________ Nettime-bold mailing list Nettime-bold@nettime.org http://www.nettime.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nettime-bold