3 ms·

To focus only on the actual website issue: Could it be in order to govern the information, rather than "copyright" per say? My thinking is that, from Yale's p

To focus only on the actual website issue: Could it be in order to govern the information, rather than "copyright" per say? My thinking is that, from Yale's perspective, having a 3rd party (and especially a student) be the go-to source for course info might be a bad shift in power. When it's all in good kind, it may not look bad, and even if it is well intended, there are a few problems that could arise: - Bugs in crawling code causing some course information to be false, omitted or stale. - Changes in OCI causing said crawler to keep stale data and fail to update. - Students complaining to Yale with wrong information. all the way to the more paranoid: - 3rd party maliciously falsifying information. - Generel confusion as to which information is reliable, driving students to have a more, rather than less, difficult time finding and verifying class scheduling. I'm all for net neutrality and strongly against censorship in all forms, but "playing devil's advocate" can't there be a somewhat "legitimate" reason to shut the 3rd party page off for Yale students?

dalke 13y ago
> can't there be a somewhat "legitimate" reason Of course there can be legitimate reasons. If the 3rd party inserted wrong data, or did 1,000 requests per second, causing high load on the servers, then I would call it legitimate. However, the ones you've listed are not legitimate, because of the term "could." Anything could go wrong. An editorial in the local newspaper could have wrong information about the courses, but that doesn't justify the university excluding that edition of the newspaper from campus stores. Things go wrong all the time. Someone may have printed out an old copy of the schedule, and based decisions on that. Or left a page on the screen for a week. Which means the system must already have support for people using stale information. Anything else is unreasonable. So long as the additional burden is not substantially higher than background, I don't believe there is a "legitimate" justification here. As for copyright, this sounds very much like like Feist v. Rural. Quoting from Wikipedia: "Feist had copied information from Rural's telephone listings to include in its own, after Rural had refused to license the information. Rural sued for copyright infringement. The Court ruled that information contained in Rural's phone directory was not copyrightable and that therefore no infringement existed."

dalke 13y ago

> can't there be a somewhat "legitimate" reason Of course there can be legitimate reasons. If the 3rd party inserted wrong data, or did 1,000 requests per second, causing high load on the servers, then I would call it legitimate. However, the ones you've listed are not legitimate, because of the term "could." Anything could go wrong. An editorial in the local newspaper could have wrong information about the courses, but that doesn't justify the university excluding that edition of the newspaper from campus stores. Things go wrong all the time. Someone may have printed out an old copy of the schedule, and based decisions on that. Or left a page on the screen for a week. Which means the system must already have support for people using stale information. Anything else is unreasonable. So long as the additional burden is not substantially higher than background, I don't believe there is a "legitimate" justification here. As for copyright, this sounds very much like like Feist v. Rural. Quoting from Wikipedia: "Feist had copied information from Rural's telephone listings to include in its own, after Rural had refused to license the information. Rural sued for copyright infringement. The Court ruled that information contained in Rural's phone directory was not copyrightable and that therefore no infringement existed."