"xurl?

[ted@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

XANABULLETIN, to the new Xanadu community

- - - - -

One of the policy questions right now is:

At what level should there be a protocol difference for
 transcopyrighted material?



Tim Berners-Lee, creator of WWW, with whom Marlene and I
 had a wonderful long evening a few weeks ago, insists
 that any transcopyright protocol should be a subclass
 of http.  (Which he designed to be extensible.

But two of my collaborators, Roger Gregory and Sam Epstein,
 think that transcopyright protocol should be recognizably
 different at the top level, eg

 xu://whatever@xxxxxxxxxx

instead of

 http://xu.whatever@xxxxxxxxxx

or the like,

in order to make it very clear to anybody who sees it
 that they're not just free to download it.  Transcopyrighted
 material needs to be obtained on whatever basis
 the rightsholder mandates.  It should be treated
 quite differently, especially put in little cubby- 
 or pigeonholes piece by piece, and composited only
 on the screen.

Putting it under a special new class of url would also
 allow us to bunch a number of different forms of
 transcopyright and Xanadu services separately under
 that protocol name, extensibly, and separate from
 the issues that concern the other Websters.

Best, T