Re: [Lynx-dev] Copyright violation? How?

[David Woolley]

On 15/11/2019 04:03, Mouse wrote:
> I tried what was reported in the thread about Google's changes, setting
> the user-agent to claim to be Mozilla.
>
> Upon setting this, lynx told me
>
> WARNING: Misrepresentation of the User-Agent may be a copyright violation!


The intellectual property rights breached will be those of the owners of 
the intellectual property, particularly trade marks, in the browsers 
that you are pretending to be.

On the other hand, Internet Explorer did this.  Because they were being 
discriminated against, in favour of Netscape, they claimed to be 
Netscape and put their real identity in parentheses.  Arguably, the 
parenthetical part might absolve them from counterfeiting, but the 
intent was that would be ignored by checks.

Current user agent strings now contain most of the information that 
browsers use in the comments, and not in the part that was supposed to 
identify the user agent.