[ NNSquad ] Re: mangling payload

[Barry Gold <bgold@matrix-consultants.com>]

Stefano Quintarelli wrote:
> Just said that it is illegal in Europe...
>
> I'd bet someone will challenge Vodafone in court.
>
> I've been notified of this of which I was not aware
> http://tinyurl.com/2ba6ao
>
> what "Giancarlo" says is that Vodafone replaces web pages content in 
> order to deliver something that looks quite the same but uses less bytes.
>
> the network apparently changes the javascripts embedding them in the 
> pages (rather than oading thm from specified URL) and images that get 
> scaled down in resolution and provided by a server which is not the 
> source one.

In the US I suspect _any_ change in the page is a violation of copyright 
(a "derivative work").  That said, I suspect nobody is going to object 
if an ISP:
  . squishes the Javascripts into fewer bytes and/or puts it inline in 
the page, as long as the actual code remains the same and continues to 
function.
  . serves up images from a local cache instead of going to the remote 
host every time(*).

However, serving up a lower-resolution image is a definite no-no -- 
again, it's a derivative work, and one that degrades the quality of 
something the originator went to considerable effort to make attractive, 
useful, or whatever other desiderata drove the page design.  Not going 
to make Google, IBM, Toyota, or M$ happy.  And they have at least as 
much to spend on lawyers as Vodafone does.

(*) caching images and other parts of a web page is a win-win-win 
situation -- as long as you don't change it:
   . the originator pays for less bandwidth, because some of his most 
biggest items get served up locally instead of from his host.
   . the ISP also pays for less bandwidth from its upstream provider, 
because they only have to fetch the image once -- after that they 
provide it from a host within their own network.
   . the user gets the page faster.