The issue of copyright violation potential kept cheap
digital recording technology out of the United States for
almost a decade. It was solved with a technology
that did do the job, but at the cost of some freedoms.
It punished the legitimate independent recording labels
who needed the technology to enter the digital market
and did nothing to incesase the revenue streams of
songwriters and major label distributors. It helped keep
the cost of those CDs on your shelf artificially high.
The means to violate the technology was provided
just as quickly as the protection. Breaking the
digital signature that was to prevent us from copying
VCR tapes and DAT tapes is cheap and easy.
Don't trade big freedoms for little securities.
Copyright and fair use issues are common
issues for all media. They will be addressed
technically on the WWW as extensions of work in the
address and location (URN/URI/URC/URL)
work groups, not in individual languages where
they will do much more systemic damage than
good. While I fully and completely recognize
the concerns of VRML authors with regards to
protection and fair compensation, I also think
they are best addressed in other forums as they
are the same issues for ANY hypermedia notation
deployed in a distributed network.
SHH! Geeks At Work. ;-)
len