BizLawCentral: Intellectual Property: Adobe to help access Flash content
One way of defeating data thieves has been to put data into flash presentations. This trick has been used by, for example, e-learning developers to prevent one user copying the content and passing it onto his colleagues. But now Adobe is making it simple to access the data as text.
Yahoo and Google moan that they can't index what's in Flash presentations. And they think that the world needs them to index everything on the web and it's an affront to their ambitions for any webmaster to make that objective difficult.
To be fair, Yahoo and Google are well behaved. If a robots.txt file says "don't enter here" they don't.
But Yahoo and Google are not representative of the majority of web-bots.
Yahoo and Google have swayed Adobe, owners of Flash and Adobe has agreed to provide tools to facilitate the indexing of content within Flash files.
The result is that webmasters will now have to rethink their robots.txt strategy. Now content that was previously invisible to the robots will become available - and may be stored in the cache at search engines.
That brings up the spectre of less well behaved bots trawling content that was intended to be produced dynamically was not visible.
Google etc. regard the change as "necessary."
But surely it raises another question: who's data is it? Public, Search Engines or its originator?
There is a big question here: are intellectual property rights dead unless you have hugely deep pockets with which to enforce them? In short, is it only the mega-corp software and media houses that will be able to protect their output?
Increasingly, it's beginning to look like it might be.
Download PDF version of this page