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Comment by ZoFreX | Hacker News Reader

So you can't find out if you've infringed copyright by making a cached copy (and if your browser is creating a re-usable, loadable at another time, HTML format backup of the page for cache purposes, it is a copy) until after loading the page and reading the copyright notice?

If only there were a way to transmit data ahead of the page body itself to indicate whether you should be permitted to store a cached copy of the page or not...

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It's generally held that if you serve a webpage you grant an implicit licence to do what's required to the incoming signal to it in order to enjoy what's served. I think it's wrong to think you even need a copyright licence to do it (see above), but there you go.

If you want to restrict usage of your website, don't use copyright, use a standard contract. You provide a service (serving a resource, e.g. a page) if a user accepts your terms of service. Also use technological measures: if your ToS aren't accepted, don't accept requests for that page. If you really want to restrict use of your site, make your site a walled garden; anybody not accepting your ToS before consuming your content then is committing digital trespass or even fraud, contrary to the Computer Misuse Act (UK). Copyright is redundant here.

You could use a HTTP header, for example:

    X-Cache-Permission: Allow

Or the one provided by the spec:

Cache-Control: no-store

Even if you don't cache the page, you are still copying the information on the servers into memory to display it...

But that is very different, both practically and legally, to creating a copy on the hard disk that may persist for days.

A copy in RAM can last as long as the computer is turned on. What if that memory page is temporarily stored on disk? What if your computer hibernates?

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