Controversy du jour: Microsoft ‘Smart Tags’ Could Violate Law – Attorney – via littlegreenfootballs blog
Based on this line of reasoning, valley url , dialectizer , et. al , vischeck color blindness simulator , lynx viewer , or even babelfish could be interpreted as “derivative works” and get the law on their asses.
The problem is not meta-manipulating content per se. The problem is when it’s *only* microsoft allowed to do the smart tagging. A nice thing might be to be able to choose your smart tagging engine. So maybe I can choose a finance specific engine so I can go to real estate and investment sites and understand that stuff better.
And Smart Tags themselves are not bad. The W3C’s Annotea seems to be the same damn thing, but without the Microsoft control, and without the bundling with the browser.
And the bundling, sports fans, was the key problem in that antitrust issue.
