271–280 of 303 posts
It is illegal to let your browser fetch this text without my permission.
As far as I'm concerned, if the information is publicly visible on a site (not behind a login) and as long as the scraping doesn't cause performance issues or generate costs on the site, then it should be perfectly fine to do.
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Actually, no. It's like taking pictures of the paintings from the street, and reselling those pictures. If they don't like that... that the painting down. Simple.
Hmm, then that becomes a copyright issue I suppose.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sui_generis_database_right
As with all rights, it varies with jurisdiction.
Im going to turn around now, and whatever happens to this site is going to happen. They worked so hard, to ask for this.
> Facebook sued, claiming that its cease-and-desist letter made Power's access unauthorized under the terms of the CFAA. Power disagreed and argued that having permission from Facebook users was good enough—it didn't need separate approval from Facebook itself.
How can be illegal if users are giving their permission? What happens if I give my permission to an external service to extract my own data?
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That argument works, insofar as it does, only for more recognizable bots and browsers. If I write a client of some sort that identifies itself as: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Snackmaster Pro/666.0.666 What do you do? I also tell my browser to lie about what it is sometimes, due to sites that are malfunctioning, but whose owners choose to document the errors instead of fixing th…
In your first case, if you are running on Windows NT 6.1 using WebKit on a new browser for humans called 'Snakemaster Pro', then you aren't doing anything wrong. If by client you mean a robot, then you are pretending to be a browser and you are accessing the service without permission. Let me ask you a question, say your client was hitting my service with that user agent, 100 times a second, crawling through urls seq…
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I disagree with your analogy. To me, the key word in "HTTP request" is request . A request is something that can be granted or not.
Perhaps more clearly would be any HTTP request that LinkedIn believes is in violation of their terms of service will be denied. It can be hard to know when the first request arrives if it is someone scraping the site or not, but once it is clear that it is someone scraping they actively deny all future requests. If they could know that the request coming in was going to be a scrape and not a page view they would pree…
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> Am I wrong? I hate to be the bearer of bad new but...maybe. A reading of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act could make robots.txt legally enforceable. And given the government's approach to CFAA cases a very aggressive interpretation, under the right circumstances (for example, when it provides evidence that the scraper knew that scrapint was not authorized), seems like a real possibility. Among the many other things…
I wouldn't be too fast to jump to conclusion robots.txt legally enforceable. You would need to cite prior case law's. Without any case law's it make decision on a law error prone at best.
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The number of photos is irrelevant to the analogy, though, as is what people do with the photos afterwards. If the bikes are visible from the public street, people can take as many pictures of every bike they want, and then make money from them if they want. It doesn't affect the owners' usage of the bike (unlike the original analogy, where the owner loses access, which was what I was trying to correct) Physical anal…
> The number of photos is irrelevant to the analogy Actually, the size of the data and the number of requests is very relevant. More data means more information, means more money. It also means more bandwidth and processing power required to process requests. You're not taking a photo of the bike, you're asking the bike to give you a photo of it. > it's just dishonest/misleading to pretend that copying data is ever a…
"The hurt occurs when people benefit from the work the original author put into creating that data without proper compensation"
Not necessarily. If I'm paying for print of some imaginative artwork that was created using the picture of the bike, that doesn't mean the bike owner lost anything, even if he spent time building the bike with his own hands. Similarly, if the only reason why people paid Hi-Q was for the extra work that they put in, LinkedIn didn't lose money because people would not have bought their product without that extra work.
There is certainly an argument that Hi-Q should have licenced the content first, but it's public data. If they want to make licence deals, don't put it in the view of the public street then whine when people are documenting what's in public.
"It's a straw man."
No, the straw man is pretending that a copy is the same as theft. Theft is theft because someone is depriving you of the original, not because you imagine you might have had more sales if the copy didn't exist. There's a reason why there are different words for different things, and pretending that a copy is the same as taking a physical object it a lie. Period.
"I place hours of working into something that doesn't put food on the table because you can clone my work, but I can't clone my food."
But, you put the price up too high, so I opted not to buy it. Maybe borrow the CD from a friend, or listen to something else. Or, you decided I couldn't buy it in the format or region I wanted. There are real issues, but pretending that a copy = a lost sale is utter bull that's been debunked time and time again, yet is regularly repeated by people trying to inject emotional arguments instead of facts.
"I'd say it's pretty obviously interfering with their business model"
Then perhaps they should address the business model or not put their content out there in public unprotected if it's that valuable to their income.
"LinkedIn could ban IPs that make unreasonable number of requests in a short amount of time."
Yes they could. Which would not have to involve the courts in any way. Or, they could protect the content in some other way that (for example) requires a log in and adherence to T&Cs, with which they could easily kick violators off their site for non-compliance.
The issue is that LinkedIn are trying to have it both ways - gathering the benefits of public content while blocking others who use the now-public content in ways that are usually acceptable for public content to be used. Sorry, not acceptable, you pick one - take the content away from the public street or accept that some people will use what has been shown to the public.
If you post it on a public network, it is defacto, public. If you don't want it scraped, take it down, or put it behind a login. If the user provides the login to a scraper, then the scraper has permission.
That's a pretty literalist, one-size fits all approach to policy. I don't think it's a good framework to use for applying ethics considerations. If I can walk near a pool, should I also be able to run? Is running anything more than faster walking? If I'm allowed to be around the pool walking with my entry ID, should I also be allowed to place my ID on a little motorized car and make it dart around the pool really fas…