ut it
mildly), it's surprising to see that I still manage to communicate successfully
by combining my poor French with gestures, facial expressions, visual clues and
diagrams. I think the Web (as opposed to old-fashioned text-only email) offers
excellent opportunities to exploit the fact that transmission of information via
different channels (or modalities) can still work, even if the process is only
partially successful for each of the channels in isolation.

= What do you think of the debate about copyright on the Web?

The baseline is of course "thou shalt not steal, even if it's easy". It's
interesting to note that, however complex it is to define legally, most people
have very good intuition about what counts as stealing:

- if I copy info from the Web and use it for my own purposes, I'm not stealing,
because this is exactly why the information was put on the Web in the first
place;

- if I copy info from the Web and re-transmit it to others, giving credit to the
author, I am not stealing;

- if I copy info from the Web and re-transmit it to others, pretending I'm the
author, I am stealing;

- if I copy info from the Web and sell it to others without permission from the
author, I am stealing.

I realize there are lots of borderline cases where it's not immediately clear
what counts as stealing, but let's leave that to the lawyers to figure out.

= What practical solutions would you suggest?

I would adopt the following rules of thumb:

- copying info for your own use is always free;

- re-transmission is OK with proper credit to the author (unless the info is
explicitely labeled as public);

- re-sale of info is OK with permission of the author (unless public).

To back this up one could envisage:

- introducing standard labels (for each mime type) which indicate whether the
info is public, and if not, point to the author;

- making browsers "label-aware", so they can show the content of the label when
displaying text, pictures and movies;

- adopting the convention/rule that info cannot be copied without the label;

- (a bit more adventurous) setting up an ISPN (international standard person
number), similar to ISBN (international standard book number) and ISSN
(international standard serial number), which identifies a person, so that
references to authors in the labels are less dependent on changes in e-mail
addresses and home pages (as long as people keep their addresses in the ISPN
database