The mysterious case of Ms. Carrie Prejean

[kandrathe]

I keep seeing this idea pop up different places, but what does it mean? The internet was originally zoned with top level domains (com, gov, edu, org), but that's largely ignored and everyone wants .com now. Also, what would something like the Lurker Lounge be? Games, politics, social networking, pr0n (at least till the mods remove it)?

Your questions reveals one of the issues. The .suffix nomenclature defines only a very limited characteristic of the web content.

To view a document you have to have a program that can interpret it, so the format has to be well known. If the format is well known you can create programs that ignore pieces of it, or overwrite them how ever you choose. DRM pushers run into this problem all the time. Anything enforced at the software level on a machine you have full access to is meaningless. The only option would be hardware enforcement (only because its more expensive to bypass), but that's not feasible unless someone plans on forcing new computers on everyone.

One need not fully protect content technically, but you would only need to be able to tell if the copy of content was authorized or not. We are talking about content now that resides on the .net, and not say a rip of a CD or DVD onto portable media. It is entirely possible to determine plagiarism of electronic copies of media even where the authorship information has been removed. I've written animation and compression algorithms based upon that principle, in fact, where you compare patterns within an image to other similar patterns in another image. You can pretty quickly deduce which percentage of the image is congruent, even when clipped or distorted. Once you've identified an illegal copy, you can proceed with legal protection against the .net host of the person holding the illegal copy.

But you are correct concerning portable media. I'm not sure what can be done other than discourage its free distribution with some RIAA skull cracking to make examples of the worst offenders.