[66964] in North American Network Operators' Group
RE: AOL web troubles.. New AOL speedup seems to be a slowdown
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Chris Parker)
Fri Jan 30 00:16:40 2004
Date: Thu, 29 Jan 2004 23:15:48 -0600
To: <nanog@merit.edu>
From: Chris Parker <cparker@starnetusa.net>
In-Reply-To: <20040130035401.AA4915DDB7@segue.merit.edu>
Errors-To: owner-nanog-outgoing@merit.edu
At 09:57 PM 1/29/2004, Benjamin Chase wrote:
>I'm quite surprised that many professional photographers haven't spoken out
>against this, as a few issues arise as a result of this:
>
>1 - Potential sales MAY be lost as a result of the degradation of quality.
>2 - Ineffective digital watermarking.
>
>One could make the argument that since AOL has such a large share of the
>online market, that by deliberately modifying imagery (especially
>commercial) in such a way, they are doing a disservice to sites that are
>very reliant on the quality of their imagery. (Getty, Corbis, etc.)
>
>An issue could also be raised about storing and reproducing (via proxy and
>ART compression) a copyrighted work without explicit permission.
Other than AOL, the current batch of dialup accelerators that work through
a lossy compression scheme give the user control over image quality ( by
providing a 'slider' bar to select preferred quality vs. speed tradeoff ).
In addition, they work well with the browser ( IE ) so you can click on
an image and get a menu option 'reload at high quality'. Thus you can view
the original unaltered image if you want.
Additionally, ( again I can't speak for whether AOL does this ), it's very
clear to the user what is going on, as there's a program that is installed,
that they can turn on or turn off as they wish. As an end-user of dial-up
at home, I use a 'web-accelerator' and it does exactly what I want. I
can load web pages faster, and if I want to see the high quality original
image of the CNN story, I can.
Am I violating a copyrighted work if I don't clean my glasses or monitor
and thus see an 'altered form' of an image? I don't think so. It is not
resent to anyone else in the altered form, and the user viewing the altered
form has made a concious decision to view it that way. Alternatively, if
the original image is 1600x1200 resolution, and I shrink it to fit on my
1024x768 image in an image viewer, I don't think you could argue I'm
transgressing copyright boundries there either.
-Chris
--
\\\|||/// \ StarNet Inc. \ Chris Parker
\ ~ ~ / \ WX *is* Wireless! \ Director, Engineering
| @ @ | \ http://www.starnetwx.net \ (847) 963-0116
oOo---(_)---oOo--\------------------------------------------------------
\ Wholesale Internet Services - http://www.megapop.net
