LYNX-DEV legal stuff

[Klaus Weide]

On Sun, 17 Nov 1996, Foteos Macrides wrote:

> "Hiram Lester, Jr." <address@hidden> wrote:
> >Do you forsee any chance of the string changing to something like Tom
> >posted the other day "Mozilla/2.0 (compatible; X11; Lynx 2.6)" or
> >something similar?  I didn't like the X11 part, but I guess that's the
> >closest recognizable thing to unix.  MSIE up through 3.01 is identifying
> >itself in this way, but I have had entries in my log of "Microsoft
> >Internet Explorer/4.40.308 (Windows 95)". hmmm...
> 
>       Netscape has threatened to sue developers who follow MSIE's
> example, and as you've noted, convinced MicroSoft to stop.

MS was not just making the string configurable, but AFAIK *recommending*
certain settings which fake "Mozilla".  I don't know whether they have
now completely disabled configurability of the User-Agent string;
we cannot conclude anything from the observation that now some MSIE
browsers don't impersonate anything.

>       The issue is whether the client can be "configured" to
> present itself as Mozilla (even with the "compatible" caveat, the
> http protocol, itself, specifies that the User-Agent identifies
> itself via what precedes the slash, and what follows the slash is
> just version and supplementary information about the UA).  Also,
> that string, per se, would not help with servers which scan explicitly
> for "Lynx" in the string and block access when present.
> 
>       It was not Netscape's overt intention to exclude Lynx from
> any sites, and the ability to change the User-Agent string, temporarily
> via the 'o'ptions menu, to get around the descrimination againt Lynx
> at some site, coupled with an informational message about copyright
> infringements when people make such a temporary change, is OK (we
> are just trying to cope with bad practice at particualr sites, not
> chronically misrepresenting Lynx as if it were Netscape).

The warning message itself, however, is wrong:

"Misrepresentaton of the User-Agent may be a copyright violation!"

Apart from a typo in the first word, I very much doubt that any such
misrepresentation could be a "copyright" violation.  If anything, it
would likely be a matter of trademarks, which is a different thing from
copyright.  I don't know enough about the details here or about Netscape's
claims in this matter to say what the correct message should be, but
this isn't it.  Lynx shouldn't by default misrepresent its identity,
but it also shouldn't misrepresent the law (of whatever country applies
here...) to its users.

   Klaus


;
; To UNSUBSCRIBE:  Send a mail message to address@hidden
;                  with "unsubscribe lynx-dev" (without the
;                  quotation marks) on a line by itself.
;