On Thursday, February 6, 2003, at 10:04 PM, Jan Dubois wrote:
I think this discussion is missing the point. It should not be: "What canThe point is: he wrote a piece of software that displays EuroTV.com's information. So did Microsoft (Explorer), so did Netscape, so did a bunch of others (I lost track counting the numbers of browsers out there).
we legally get away with?", but "Do we have the courtesy to respect the
wishes of publishers of information?", even if their wishes might not be
legally enforceable.
Since this is about Perl advocacy, I would like to quote a bit of Perl
culture: "It [Perl] would prefer that you stayed out of its living room
because you weren't invited, not because it has a shotgun."
I think the same rules should apply for screenscrapers too: If website
owners don't want their pages to be scraped, then people shouldn't do it
and get their information elsewhere. It is like honoring a robots.txt
file. It is probably not enforceable, but it is the right thing to do.
How on earth can he be sued? Surely, they'd have to sue Bill as well?
