3 ms·

It's completely perpendicular, not parallel. Public safety communications are radio waves that are broadcasted and the ability to passively monitor them is ens

It's completely perpendicular, not parallel. Public safety communications are radio waves that are broadcasted and the ability to passively monitor them is enshrined in United States law. That is a massively key difference. If I was sending data into your home from my infrastructure without any action from you whatsoever, and you were reaching up into the air and gathering it and repackaging it, AND the law said that I have no intellectual property rights to said data, then that's a whole different story.

zarzavat 2y ago
Every time you use Google you benefit from scraping. Scraping is how the world works for the last 25+ years. You are trying to draw a distinction between data that is pushed and data that is pulled, and maybe there is some economic argument there in terms of resource usage, but that is very context-dependent. In UK listening to public radio broadcasts is illegal. I think this law is idiotic and ignore it. It seems you do too since there appear to be streams from UK on your site :)
- theamk 2y ago
  Google benefits from legal scraping - ban them from robots.txt and they'll stop. Please don't mix consensual and non-consensual scraping, the difference is huge.
edgyquant 2y ago
You are scraping radio signals and selling it. It’s an exact parallel and if you fail to see this it is indeed hilarious.
- throwaway48476 2y ago
  It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
- blantonl 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - papichulo2023 2y ago
    So you only point that scrapping data is bad because the cost? How do you know that the site someone is scraping doesnt have fixed cost?
    - theamk 2y ago
      no, scraping data is bad because this is against owners wishes. In US, if you broadcast, the by law you consent to be received and recorded. If you scrape data, there is no such law. And if you get consent (say by finding the permissive robots.txt), then go ahead and scrape.
      - sangnoir 2y ago
        > no, scraping data is bad because this is against owners wishes The broadcasters weren't happy about home cassette recording either, and the case went all the way up to the supreme court. If I can legally record cable, then it's nit a stretch to say I can also "record" what's on the public Internet for my own use. Morally speaking, we have to consider the other side of the equation - operator may not be happy about being scraped, but as a user, is it okay for me to build or use a scraper-based price-comparison or price-tracking platform? I'd say yes, even though most sellers wouldn't want to have this data scraped.
        theamk 2y ago
        I see a difference between "scrape for personal use", "scrape for public good" and "scrape to earn money from". Everything is fine for personal use - you are choosing how to consume the websites, and if you choose to do it by extracting all the data into tables, that's fine. Public good scraping is slightly murkier morally but I guess it's also fine? Similar to "fair use" copyright exceptions. (Unless it's commercial companies pretending to do "public good" solely for their own benefits, like AI "open dataset". Those should be banned.) "Scrape to earn money from" is not OK. And sadly, this seems to be the majority of all scraping projects, such as: copy the sites wholesale and display your own ads on them, collect data to train AI on, for SEO (=make everyone's search results worse). The good analogy is what would you do in a public place like a cafe: can you do your personal work? No problem at all. Can you put a non-commercial poster or sign? This may be OK. Can you earn money off it (say sell your own stuff inside)? No way.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
CaptainFever 2y ago
You realise web scraping is a legal right too?

zarzavat 2y ago

Every time you use Google you benefit from scraping. Scraping is how the world works for the last 25+ years. You are trying to draw a distinction between data that is pushed and data that is pulled, and maybe there is some economic argument there in terms of resource usage, but that is very context-dependent. In UK listening to public radio broadcasts is illegal. I think this law is idiotic and ignore it. It seems you do too since there appear to be streams from UK on your site :)

theamk 2y ago
Google benefits from legal scraping - ban them from robots.txt and they'll stop. Please don't mix consensual and non-consensual scraping, the difference is huge.

edgyquant 2y ago

You are scraping radio signals and selling it. It’s an exact parallel and if you fail to see this it is indeed hilarious.

throwaway48476 2y ago
It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
blantonl 2y ago
[flagged]
- papichulo2023 2y ago
  So you only point that scrapping data is bad because the cost? How do you know that the site someone is scraping doesnt have fixed cost?
  - theamk 2y ago
    no, scraping data is bad because this is against owners wishes. In US, if you broadcast, the by law you consent to be received and recorded. If you scrape data, there is no such law. And if you get consent (say by finding the permissive robots.txt), then go ahead and scrape.
    - sangnoir 2y ago
      > no, scraping data is bad because this is against owners wishes The broadcasters weren't happy about home cassette recording either, and the case went all the way up to the supreme court. If I can legally record cable, then it's nit a stretch to say I can also "record" what's on the public Internet for my own use. Morally speaking, we have to consider the other side of the equation - operator may not be happy about being scraped, but as a user, is it okay for me to build or use a scraper-based price-comparison or price-tracking platform? I'd say yes, even though most sellers wouldn't want to have this data scraped.
      - theamk 2y ago
        I see a difference between "scrape for personal use", "scrape for public good" and "scrape to earn money from". Everything is fine for personal use - you are choosing how to consume the websites, and if you choose to do it by extracting all the data into tables, that's fine. Public good scraping is slightly murkier morally but I guess it's also fine? Similar to "fair use" copyright exceptions. (Unless it's commercial companies pretending to do "public good" solely for their own benefits, like AI "open dataset". Those should be banned.) "Scrape to earn money from" is not OK. And sadly, this seems to be the majority of all scraping projects, such as: copy the sites wholesale and display your own ads on them, collect data to train AI on, for SEO (=make everyone's search results worse). The good analogy is what would you do in a public place like a cafe: can you do your personal work? No problem at all. Can you put a non-commercial poster or sign? This may be OK. Can you earn money off it (say sell your own stuff inside)? No way.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

CaptainFever 2y ago

You realise web scraping is a legal right too?