vincevincevince - 3:27 am on Oct 20, 2007 (gmt 0)

Brett, whilst what you say makes perfect sense to the average lay-person, it ignores the fact that the web pages are hypertext which has been marked up and transformations from plain text, if any, are the choice of the end user. We have browsing capabilities ranging from plain hypertext such as telnet terminals, through text-based such as lynx, to minimalist embedded browsers which pick and choose tags, all the way to high-end presentational rendering found with IE7 and Firefox.

Even the most advanced renderers treat markup differently, but yet they are all correct (if not standard-based); underlining the fact that marked-up hypertext is what is published and not the 'page as rendered' because such a thing does not exist.

It is that aspect of the user agreement which goes too far, the part which forbids the user to read the hypertext - because whatever form the reader views it in, it is still a valid representation of hypertext, even if that is as 'source'. To put it another way - viewing the un-rendered hypertext and understanding the semantics yourself, as written, is exactly the same as viewing the IE7 rendered hypertext and having IE7 pick some representation of some of the semantics, just two ends of one sliding scale.

And it is good that they want to take a stand for our intellectual property rights; but they need to do so in a way which is technically and not just legally accurate.