More than 60 percent ads. Oh, and some news squeezed between. The Golden Gater's tarnished by lack of funds these days. 'Tis a sad, but typical phenomena in a medium controlled by space, a commodity with a high-market value.
This is not true of the World Wide Web, the land of space a-go-go. And since this column deals almost exclusively with (yeah, I'm gonna say it. My apologies.) cyberspace, Technophile is considering a move to the WWW on the SF State Online Gater (http://www.journalism.sfsu.edu/www/pubs/gater.htm).
If all goes well, and I can still get story credit, that's where you'll find me next week.
He knew it was coming. In fact, SF State journalism senior phred Lender (http://sfsu.edu/~phlen/homep.html) says he had been "quietly giggling" about it for weeks.
Then, on Nov. 3 , the call came: "Hi Mr. Lender, my name is John True, director of Computing Services at SF State. I need to speak with you concerning copyrighted material on your homepage in your Internet account. Please contact my office at your earliest convenience..."
Busted.
The infraction: appropriating, altering and displaying an unauthorized version of the Lexis-Nexis (http://www.lexis-nexis.com) corporation's logo from the company's WWW page, a wanton violation of United States Copyright law (http://www.law.cornell.edu/usc/17/overview.html).
The Lexis-Nexis Corp. provides a subscription-only, searchable electronic database of court records, magazines and multitudes of other public information.
"It all seemed harmless enough at the time -- I figured anyone over 12 would know the difference, and anyone under 12 probably never heard of Lexis-Nexis anyway," Lender said. "As it happens, most people think it has something to do with a car."
According to Lender, an unidentified representative of the Lexis-Nexis Corp. called True to complain about his use of their intellectual property. True, in turn, called Lender and instructed him to remove the graphic from his account.
True would not comment on the incident. The Lexis-Nexis Corp. did not answer repeated attempts to contact them on the matter.
Until Nov. 3 -- when the offending graphic was removed from the SF State server -- Lender's homepage featured an altered image of the Lexis-Nexis' logo with the name "phred lender" entered into a faux search string, which Lender created.
To get any further into his site, the user would have to click on a button which read "submit," imitating the search function of any database, like Lexis-Nexis.
"I offered a facsimile of their service in a web format -- really only a hint of what they could do if they put their minds to it. If you've used their service, you know it's not near as user-friendly as what you could have found (on his homepage)," Lender said.
The next page of his site featured innocuous pictures of Lender's bedroom, text of what shows he'd seen -- or missed -- that week, and hyperlinks to his and his friend's other projects.
"The issue is not that I created an interactive database of legal dogma -- I didn't -- but that I created my history at the expense of their reputation. I took the idea of the all-knowing eye, the Big Brother at the other end of my IP address and tacked their name and logo to it," he says.
Lender's page, with the offending graphic, had been up on the Web for about four months without a complaint. But three weeks prior to its discovery by Lexis-Nexis, Lender registered the page with Yahoo (http://www.yahoo.com), a monstrous, widely-used Web-only database.
From there, it was only a matter of time before the (virtual) copyright cops showed up at his (virtual) door.
But even after the graphic (http://www.creative.net/~phlen/img/proof.jpg) was removed from Lender's SF State account and moved to a commercial account, if the search term "Lexis-Nexis" is entered into the Yahoo server, four matches will be returned. The third entry is Lender's page. It reads: Lexis-Nexis query results: phred lender.
SF State Instructional Technologies student Jeff Schwartz (http://www.zoom.com/~webdog) has also had trouble with copyright, but from the other end.
About nine months ago, the Marin Unified School district (http://marin.k12.ca.us/k12.html) was shopping around for a Web site to call their own. Apparently, Schwartz's page was exactly what they were looking for. So they took it.
"I searched through their site to get email addresses for the superintendent and all her powerful buddies. I sent a simple message to the webmaster demanding that the page be removed, CC-ing all the head honchos," said Schwartz.
Hours later, the page was removed. "I sent a nice 'thank you' note to all involved," he said.
Then it happened again.
"I had a number of pages copied and put up identically by a computer club (http://blitzen.canberra.edu.au/multimedia) in Canberra (Calif.). They just signed their name and took credit for my creation."
But they made one fatal error, said Schwartz.
"They also inlined a graphic from my server and from a server in Berkeley. The guy in Berkeley notified me, and we decided that instead of demanding that they take down the page, we would play with them a little first."
Since the graphics were not stolen outright, but rather were referenced -- a simple programming tag that will extract information stored on another server giving the appearance of ownership -- Schwartz decided to intermittently change the graphic to foul the plot.
"At first, we were mostly silly, then we got kinda obnoxious and rude. After a week, they caught on. Currently, they have an apology for the graphic that had been put up. They've also taken down most of the stuff they stole.
But, Schwartz adds, "I've never received any comment or apology from them."
But wait, there's more...
The story isn't over yet. In the eyes of SF State, your Web page, technically, may make you a criminal as well.
Technophile gleefully accepts hate mail. He can be reached at: kbrown@sfsu.edu, or thoth@creative.net.
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