Copyright and the World Wide Web

For me as a small time publisher, the Web offers many interesting features. It offers me a cheap distribution channel (try beating 50 euro/month for thousands of readers worldwide, and untill I get over several milions of readers it will not get more expensive), it makes that interested people can find my publications, either through others linking to them or through search engines, and it even makes for my publications being accessable when my own servers fail.

I have been admin/arch on a so called MUD for many years, starting in the mid 90s.The MUD I started out on is written in a language called LPC, and when I left there in 2003, I started on writing a new system/game library for such a MUD. As part of this library, I wrote a webserver.

I also run a somewhat complex Apache configuration, and at first, the purpose of this small http server was to present some information from within the game and no more then that, and as such only needed a very limited subset of http. Once I got to implement and activate the http server it turned out to perform a lot better then I had expected, and on a slow evening I decided to rewrite it to become a proper, general purpose http server.

The current implementation serves static files as well as being able to retrieve content from LPC objects. It has built in session management (and supports cookies) and it even supports namebased virtual servers.

Trying to help out with the difficulties of buying and selling on the web, I started this new project to collect information about dubious sales and items.

Check out FakeItems.ORG.

In the previous part I explained why some of the most popular suggestions for fixing the spam problem will not work.In this part I will start defining how the problem can be solved.

You have e-mail? then you definitely heard about, and experienced yourself this thing called spam. Having your mailbox flooded by advertisements that you didn't ask for, and that are often of a rather dubious nature.