r11co wrote:
Greater Manchester Police are looking for ways to waste their fines surplus again. With a leaflet this time...
PropagandaI see SafeSpeed gets a dirty mark in there.
What I want to know is, are url's copyright and, if so, can we ask for that to be removed?
Good question. The safespeed on it’s own might be subject to legal constraints, but the www is certainly not copyright, nor is the org.uk bit – they are part of the Internet - conventions and hierarchical DNS domains, respectively.
They have published a fully qualified domain name (FQDN), not a full URL. As far as I know, url's (or hostnames or FQDNs) are not subject to copyright, any more than your name or street address is. The purpose of Uniform Resource Locators (
http://www.w3.org/Addressing/) is to allow people to address you (us?), i.e. identify and locate. From memory, they are comprised of a protocol name, a host name and a relative file system offset that the server uses to fetch the required page. There was a case a few years back about deep linking, but I think it's gone away now. Basically, if people can link to you from a web page, your url is tied to the Internet. And a url can be in any device including, naturally enough, a printed document, or even person’s memory!
Anyone else got any more to add on this?