Dave Winer has set up a silly straw-man in his ongoing complaints about utilities like Greasemonkey and the Google Toolbar that let the user modify content that appears in their browser. Dave wonders if he can do the same thing with Cory Doctorow’s CC-licensed books.
And the answer is that, of course he can. If Dave wants to download Cory’s books and edit them so he appears as the author, that’s completely within his rights. He could remove words, add words, do whatever he wants to the text in his browser or text editor, just as users can use Autolink or Greasemonkey to make any sort of modifications they want to text appearing in their browser.
But Dave sets up a straw man when he wonders if he then would be able to set up shop and sell said modified novel. Well, of course not, except within the terms of the CC licenses Cory uses. Reproducing and redistributing said modified content is a completely different issue. Neither Autolink nor Greasemonkey, after all, allow the user to hit a button and publish their modified content to a website. There’s nothing there that says take the content you’ve modified and redistribute it to other users.
Whether or not I should be able to create a filter that replaces all instance of “Dave Winer” with some expletive is a completely separate issue from whether or not I should be able to wholesale copy and paste all the content from Scripting.Com onto my blog and pretend that I wrote it.
It is worth noting, however, that Winer regularly reproduces people’s content in the form of screen shots which he then annotates or otherwise modifies, so its a bit odd to see him suddenly attacking the ability to reproduce, modify and republish content that he doesn’t own. Did he receive permission from Yahoo 360, for example, for reproducing, modifying and redistributing this screen shot? But I thought publishers had absolute rights to never have their content modified by others without their permission?
