E-shopping
Sanjida O'Connell is right, of course (Why shoppers shy away from the net, Online, July 20). For many who are comparatively "old hands" at surfing the net and who are "just ordinary" folks, any attempt at window shopping on the net is not only frustrating, but boring. It can also be costly, and very time wasting. For the house bound, and those who just cannot afford the time to go "supermarketing" and of course, the initially curious, some level of business will establish itself.
But human beings need stimulation, including getting to and returning from centres of commercial interest. All sorts of things can happen and all sorts of people can be met. Not so on the net. Long live lovely, wonderful human individuality and choice.
Robert Davis
robarb@pisle5.freeserve.co.uk.
Jenni's first
Contrary to the assertion in Web Watch, www.jennycam.com is not by any means a classic. It is a rip-off of the name of the real classic www.jennicam.com. There are many variations on the name in attempts to cash in the fame of the original. Almost any recognisable distortion will produce a derivative web site, but most of them are commercial and sleazy.
John R Batts
johnbatts@banbury19.freeserve.co.uk
Opera lover
Stephen Dunn writes about how annoying it is for web developers that Opera impersonates other browsers. (Online, July 20) . But it is only because of sloppy, lazy web developers who don't understand that the web is designed to run across a variety of browsers from Lynx to Netscape and insist on coding for Internet Exploiter only that Opera has to resort to this tactic. Anthony Cunningham
tjc@tardis.ed.ac.uk
Water works
John Eason's interesting commentary on urban myths (Weblife, July 20) poses the question "Is there any truth to the legend that water swirls down the plughole counter- clockwise in Australia?" The answer, surely, is yes. I recall that in the 1960s the journal Nature reported the findings of an experiment using a carefully engineered vibration-free temperature-controlled bowl. In the southern hemisphere, as may be expected, water did indeed swirl counter-clockwise. Stan Brown
brownfarthings@aol.com
Picture law
Whatever the international situation, the copyright problem raised by Guy Clapperton does seem to be covered under English Law, specifically by the Copyright Act and by the House of Lords Report on Digital Imaging. The concept is that of an original from which copies can be made. The author, in this case the photographer, holds copyright in the original and has the right to make copies and to charge anyone else who wishes to do so.
The original is, in traditional photography, the negative or transparency which results from processing the film after exposure to light. It may be copied in various ways, including scanning, but the original, with its copyright, still exists and any copies produced from the digital file are still copies of the original.
A different situation arises when the digital file is produced directly using a digital camera. The House of Lords says that a digital file can never be an original because it can only be copied digitally. If there is no original there can be no copyright. Thus, in the Sygma case, some authors may be entitled to copying fees, others not, depending on whether or not the digital file came from a copyright original.
George Kitchin
george@gkphoto.freeserve.co.uk
