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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical RE: AOL web troubles.. New AOL speedup seems to be a slowdown
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
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