Tony, i saw your message linked to this slashdot article
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/06/07/1252227
About 5 minutes ago.
THe article is about atechnology which is going to be in IE6 that adds *smart tags* to webpages without the authors permission that add links based on words to various sites, no doubt these sites will pay a premium to microsoft for this. I have to question the morality/legality of modifying copyrighted content in *any* way without the authors opinion, what do you lot think? They will eb able to be disabled but still......As the author of ocelet.hypermart.net the idea of microsft, a compnay i despise shoving its paid for links all over my content shits me up the wall.....

The first thing I thought was, hey this is familiar. NBCi did advertising on US TV with some feature they came up with: ads that repeated "Any Word, Click It, Get Information!"

The whole idea goes directly against how information on the web is presented. In fact, pushing this shinola is totally offensive.

The page author is the one to decide what's linkable and what information is presented. If one wants to, one can hyperlink every single space on a page to anything one wants. It's easy to do, supported by current tools, and enabled in every browser since the first one.

The ability for anyone to publish is what the web's revolution is all about. The ability of powerful interests to basically add their own content has the potential to turn that revolution around full-circle.

The Remarq people did this to Usenet. It was immensely unpopular and I think they even got sued. They stopped.

And from what I've read...NBCi has been a big money-loser, although NBCi is apparently its own separate company.

And with any luck, the same thing will happen to this stupid idea. They get sued to hell. I doubt AOL-Time Warner will likr it when AOL.com links back to MSN sites....I'd love to see a world-wide-webmaster class action over this =)

from my understanding of the issue, there isn't much anyone can do. browsers render content on the user end... you could as much sue M$ for this as you could for IE incorrectly displaying a tag or table.

Well it is modifying copyrighted infomation wihtout prior authorisation decent groudn to sue there. Apartly tehre will be a tag (i have it on my pages but i've forgotten it right now) that disables it.

irrelevant. M$ can get away with anything.