People want to turn this into a legal debate, but it's not. It's a tools debate, and the main product of a builder of social tools is not the tool itself but the culture that it creates. So what sort of society do you want to create?

Ultimately, if Web Annotation does take off as a feature of the Web, these cases will become all too common. And I don't think that scholarly and academic uses will be immune (though the accountability and reputation risk will reduce abuse). And if such abuse continues, it reduces the value and incentive for Web Annotation to succeed at all.

Without consent.

One criticism we have heard loud and clear is that the “without consent” clause in our principles is problematic. When forming these principles, we meant that individuals would be able to annotate the documents of corporate and governmental entities, or other powerful groups, without needing their approval — such as when the scientists of Climate Feedback annotate climate change coverage. But we acknowledge that our choice of language was poor. We will change it soon.

Trayvon Martin

a more insidious and cancerous progression took hold through municipal fiscal discipline, property speculation and the sorting of land-use according to the rate of return for its ‘highest and best use’.

And if it be objected that one who uses such power of speech unjustly might do great harm, that is a charge which may be made in common against all good things except virtue, and above all against the things that are most useful, as strength, health, wealth, generalship.

For they taught their art for a good purpose, to be used against enemies and evil-doers, in self-defence not in aggression, and others have perverted their instructions, and turned to a bad use their own strength and skill. But not on this account are the teachers bad, neither is the art in fault, or bad in itself; I should rather say that those who make a bad use of the art are to blame. And the same argument holds good of rhetoric; for the rhetorician can speak against all men and upon any subject,—in short, he can persuade the multitude better than any other man of anything which he pleases, but he should not therefore seek to defraud the physician or any other artist of his reputation merely because he has the power; he ought to use rhetoric fairly, as he would also use his athletic powers.