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Apple issues DMCA to iPhone 5S availability tracker
- streetnigga 13y agoReasonable use of DMCA? Or another brick in the walled garden? These questions aside I find use of DMCAs to be a bit egregious lately, with little protection being afforded while much has been done to raise the unworldly punishments wrought on copyright complaints increasing fines to the point where they mirror court settlements for financial firms.
- dylz 13y agoI feel this is 100% reasonable. They are abusively spidering Apples servers in addition to a trademark violation in the domain.
- yuubi 13y agoPlease cite the bit of the DMCA related to either of those?
- josephlord 13y agoPlease cite the notice claiming to be a DMCA notification rather than a plain vanilla legal threat/C&D notice.
- yuubi 13y agoIt had most of the language of a DMCA notice and was headed "DMCA Takedown Notice". Now that you mention it, the actual text doesn't exactly say DMCA.
- josephlord 13y agoI think (not absolutely certain though) that the DMCA heading was added by the person that it had been sent to rather than Apple/their lawyers.
- gergles 13y agoIt's the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, not the Digital Millennium "be nice to our servers and protect our trademarks" act. DMCA is not the correct tool for this.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- madeofpalk 13y agoLuckiliy, this isnt a DCMA takedown notice, nor does it claim to be. Just a standard run-of-the-mill cease and desist.
- axman6 13y agoWhat did the website originally do?
- selectodude 13y agoIt would tell you which stores near your zip code had iPhone 5Ss (that's awkward to type), and which size, carrier and color they were.
- hiitssteve 13y agoSent you an email when the apple store you indicated showed availability for the iPhone 5s
- 37prime 13y agoHere’s from the Takedown notice: [4] Reason: Content Type / Violation: Automated scraping/copying/acquiring web app, operating in violation of the apple.com Internet Service Terms of Use
- Maarten88 13y agoThey could also sue Google for this violation.
- cmelbye 13y agoSure, but why? I'm sure they love the search traffic that Google gives them. I'm not so sure they love someone scraping an internal in-store pick up API to analyze their inventory and cause incidents of "What do you mean you don't have the 64 GB Gold iPhone 5S for Verizon!? This website says you have it in stock!"
- 37prime 13y agoApparently you're trying to cut down a tree in the forest with a red herring. Google doesn't do what apple-tracker.com was doing.
- laumars 13y agoAside this thread, I'm not familiar with apple-tracker.com, however 'Froogle' (Google's shopping part of it's search engine) does do product searches, availability and price matching.
- rsynnott 13y agoFroogle (when it existed; they killed it a while back) obeyed this, though: http://store.apple.com/robots.txt http://store.apple.com/robots.txt
- rsynnott 13y agoGoogle obeys robots.txt: http://store.apple.com/robots.txt http://store.apple.com/robots.txt Clearly, this service doesn't.
- comex 13y agoNote that this is not a DMCA notice, as it does not have to do with copyright; however, despite following a DMCA notice template, it doesn't actually claim to be, except for this nonsensical sentence: "I have a good faith belief that the removal of copyright management information from the material listed above is not authorized by law."
- jwise0 13y agoImportantly, facts are not copyrightable (/Feist v. Rural/ was the Supreme Court decision that cemented this into the case law), so not only is this not a DMCA notice, the DMCA -- as best I understand -- couldn't possibly apply here. Now, a cease and desist from scraping would be completely within their rights to do -- as far as I understand, nobody's come to any consensus as to whether terms of use are legally enforceable, but given the way aaronsw's case was going, I'm not convinced that a court would back this use of Apple's site.
- PilateDeGuerre 13y agoHey Mordy you're sure to stop by and read this at some point so this appeal is to you: Please put your code up on GitHub. sed -i 's/Apple/aFruit/g' if you'd feel better about it that way, but fuck Apple and allow people to run their own Heroku app if they'd like.
- milkshakes 13y agofor what it's worth, this appears to be an invalid claim under the DMCA, and filing a counter-claim is actually relatively straightforward: http://www.dmlp.org/legal-guide/responding-dmca-takedown-notice-targeting-your-content http://www.dmlp.org/legal-guide/responding-dmca-takedown-not...
- accountoftheday 13y agoNo claim is made under the DMCA, it is merely made to look similarly scary.
- kika 13y agoWe need a list, somewhere on wiki, to collect all these notices and store them forever. Then one day when I'm working on a next venture round and the law firm comes knocking, trying to "help" me for the sizable chunk of this funding, I'll quickly run their name. And will tell them "guys, I'm trying to innovate, you're trying to kill innovation. You're not friends, you're foes. Go away, #$%$%#$%^$^" :-) I'm sure Apple's money are not my measly $50K, but there're not enough Apples for all the law firms out there...
- magicalist 13y agoThere is one. The Chilling Effects database has collected them for some time, though the contents aren't collected automatically, they're submitted voluntarily. The database contains mostly DMCA takedown notices, but also several other types of cease and desist orders. https://www.chillingeffects.org/notice.cgi https://www.chillingeffects.org/notice.cgi You can search by field[1], including sender, though note that many won't contain a law firm as the sender since many companies farm out their DMCA complaints to companies that do nothing but file mass automated complaints (which gets you things like Microsoft demanding that Google remove links to pages on microsoft.com[2]). [1] http://chillingeffects.org/search.cgi http://chillingeffects.org/search.cgi [2] http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/09/microsofts-copyright-bots-ask-google-to-hide-microsoft-com-links/ http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/09/microsofts-copyri...
- Tarang 13y agoWhy is apple going all evil all of a sudden. I would have thought they would like people to know where to buy their stuff.
- jhack 13y agoAll of a sudden?
- Iftheshoefits 13y ago1) It's hardly sudden. 2) People who buy Apple products aren't buying technology as much as they are buying into a culture that features technology as a badge of identification; they'll "know where to buy [Apple] stuff" whether or not this site exists.
- matthewmacleod 13y ago2000 called; it wants it's clichè back.
- zamalek 13y agoThey have been evil ever since they removed USB mass storage support from iPods. They have just been hiding it all behind a fashion facade.
- angelomichel_nl 13y agoWhat's all the fuzz about? I am happy that those kind of sites are taken down. Full of ads. They ruin the interwebs. Or am I missing anything?
- coob 13y agoWhat I don't understand about all this is that Apple used to have availability trackers of their own!
- rsynnott 13y agoAs the site's robots.txt tells crawlers not to do this, doesn't seem hugely unreasonable: http://store.apple.com/robots.txt http://store.apple.com/robots.txt
- joezydeco 13y agoA few years ago I set up a twitter account, @MacRefurb. It's a kludge that linked refurb-tracker.com's scraper to twitter via some RSS-to-tweet service that I can't even remember where to login now. It's been running for over 4 years now and nary a DMCA peep. I guess it's just off Apple's radar.