wwp@yahoogroups.com:
kiosk mode
G. Donald Bain 2005-Oct-24 23:02:00
When Andy first drew our attention to this matter, I honestly thought
we had been using kioskmode all along. But I checked the code and found
out we hadn't.
Landis, Markus, and I agreed it was probably a good thing, and not a
big deal, so it was incorporated into the second iteration of the
current event (Energy).
In the past I have warned participants that they will inevitably lose
some control over their work simply by placing it on a popular web
site. It is just the nature of the medium.
But we (the WWP administrators) have undertaken to protect everyone's
copyrighted work so far as is reasonable. Copyright notices appear
directly below every panorama on the site, and a more comprehensive
copyright statement is at the bottom of the home page and on several
other top level pages. The same statement appears on all html pages in
the copyright metadata field.
Kiosk mode is a simple and not very effective sort of protection. It
doesn't take hacking or special software to grab a pano off a kisokmode
protected page - just change the url of the page holding the pano, to
the url of the pano itself. Anyone who knows a little html can figure
this out.
http://geoimages.berkeley.edu/wwp905/html/AndySavage.html
becomes:
http://geoimages.berkeley.edu/wwp905/qtvr/normal/AndySavage.mov
or:
http://geoimages.berkeley.edu/wwp905/qtvr/fullscreen/AndySavage.mov
So what is the point? We cannot absolutely protect your work, but we
can make it so that someone downloading it has made an explicit choice
to do so. They can't say they didn't know it was copyright. They can't
just right-click (or Control-click) on it. They have to take extra
steps circumventing our protection to do so.
There are certainly valid reasons for letting people easily download
files such as these. They have intrinsic educational value, and it
helps VR technology gain greater public mindshare. But when separated
from their page on the WWP site the panoramas lose a lot of their
value.
On a related topic, I urge everyone to use the metadata fields in the
QuickTime movie file itself. If your pano becomes separated from its
html page it will still retain this information - a pano played in QT
PLayer as a standalone will thus have a title across the top. Also, the
Movie Info window will show your name, your website, a copyright
notice, and even a short caption.
The kioskmode issue is still open. We can't base all decisions on
polls, but we do want to know what everyone thinks. Cast your vote at:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/wwp/surveys?id=1811697
Don
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G. Donald Bain
Director, Geography Computing Facility
University of California Berkeley