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Those essays are available for free on his site. If you want to scrap it for yourself, you're in a grey zone, but it will be fine. But hey, authors deserve resp
by tangue 14y ago
Those essays are available for free on his site. If you want to scrap it for yourself, you're in a grey zone, but it will be fine. But hey, authors deserve respect : if an author wants to publish an ebook, he will.
- georgeorwell 14y agoWhy am I in a grey zone for manipulating a bunch of bytes that I have downloaded into a format I find convenient? The bytes were distributed legally by the copyright holder. I downloaded the bytes legally using an ISP that I paid for. The author did not use a robots.txt indicating his wishes that I not download the bytes using an automatic tool. The bytes are unprotected by DRM. I have no intention to distribute the bytes to anyone else. I have not broken the DRM on my ebook reader.
- tangue 14y agoYou can scrap for yourself (or in Instapaper, but that's another story), but sharing a script and telling the others to do so is bad. Call me old fashioned, but I'm thinking that an author has his word to say on the way to structure and distribute his works.
- cowsaysoink 14y agoScraping content isn't bad if you aren't redistributing it, technically your web browser is scraping content in the same sense. http://paulgraham.com/robots.txt http://paulgraham.com/robots.txt doesn't disallow robots from reading the essays.
- tangue 14y agoLet's not be naïve. This is geek-clad redistribution.