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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
by greendestiny 16y ago
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?
- Animus7 16y agoGoogle can mine the data and do whatever they want (and I don't doubt for a second that they run analysis on it), but this guy can't? Facebook wants to have their cake and eat it to. They want free Google publicity but god forbid some dude starts downloading pages for research. It's legal, but it's wrong.
- greendestiny 16y agoI'm really only interested in the legal question. And I genuinely would like to be convinced that the legal system would allow scraping like this. I just don't see it.
- mnutt 16y agoGathering 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 using the data in his research he's not using their presentation of the data.
- greendestiny 16y agoThanks for that, it at least convinces me that its not cut and dried. I think you have a good point about the copyright aspects particularly.