31–39 of 39 posts
I notice they have updated their robots.txt to only allow user agents they have approved. http://www.facebook.com/apps/site_scraping_tos.php
"my lawyer advised me that it had never been tested in court, and the legal costs alone of being a test case would bankrupt me" What's to stop two smaller companies making a "court case" where they sue each other for small bucks with the desired outcome (following robots.txt is a legal way to access a site with a crawler). This would then set a precedent that would benefit others as a whole.
Now that you mention it, what's stopping two such companies from manipulating the result of this landmark case ? What's stopping Facebook from setting up a puppet company to sue to obtain their desired precedent ? This seems like a huge hole in the "let's let the courts decide the law system".
"my lawyer advised me that it had never been tested in court, and the legal costs alone of being a test case would bankrupt me" What's to stop two smaller companies making a "court case" where they sue each other for small bucks with the desired outcome (following robots.txt is a legal way to access a site with a crawler). This would then set a precedent that would benefit others as a whole.
Now that you mention it, what's stopping two such companies from manipulating the result of this landmark case ? What's stopping Facebook from setting up a puppet company to sue to obtain their desired precedent ? This seems like a huge hole in the "let's let the courts decide the law system".
From the leaked HBGary emails:
"The Palantir employee noted that a researcher had used similar tools to violate Facebook's acceptable use policy on data scraping, 'resulting in a lawsuit when he crawled most of Facebook's social graph to build some statistics. I'd be worried about doing the same. (I'd ask him for his Facebook data—he's a fan of Palantir—but he's already deleted it.)'"
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/02/black-ops-ho...
Someone convince me what facebook said here was wrong. I don't think robots.txt gives you a license to do whatever you want with web content. If it did wouldn't robots.txt effectively put everything into the public domain?
I am not a lawyer, but I think it comes down to website Terms of Service enforceability. I don't know what the precedents are, but I would guess that a TOS that went against the nature of how the web is reasonably expected to operate would not stand up in court.
I don't think it's a copyright issue; facts are not copyrightable and by using the data in his research he's not using their presentation of the data.
Someone convince me what facebook said here was wrong. I don't think robots.txt gives you a license to do whatever you want with web content. If it did wouldn't robots.txt effectively put everything into the public domain?
Gathering information from a website is very different than publishing it verbatim. I am not a lawyer, but I think it comes down to website Terms of Service enforceability. I don't know what the precedents are, but I would guess that a TOS that went against the nature of how the web is reasonably expected to operate would not stand up in court. I don't think it's a copyright issue; facts are not copyrightable and by…
Short story: Back in the days when there was actual competition in the online auction market (anyone remember Yahoo! Auctions?), Bidder's Edge was crawling eBay listings to index them for an auction search engine. (I worked for one of their competitors.) eBay sued on a trespass theory, and was granted a preliminary injunction because the judge held that eBay was likely to succeed on the merits of the claim.
Unfortunately, the trespass claim was never fully litigated; Bidder's Edge agreed to stop crawling after the PI was granted.
For me, facebook is just another bigheaded company, that is trying to turn your social life into their product [2]. And that is not the place, where I want to hang out with friends online. (And I dont.)
[1] http://suicidemachine.org/download/Web_2.0_Suicide_Machine.p...
[2] http://twitter.com/#!/librarythingtim/status/13226541303