On Thu, Feb 06, 2003 at 09:19:33PM +0100, Bas A. Schulte wrote: > Hiya, > > On Thursday, February 6, 2003, at 09:05 PM, Gabor Szabo wrote: > > >Some of you might have seen this as this went to > >the module-authors list. > > > >What do you think about the legal aspects of this ? > > I'm no lawyer but I do not believe this is going to hold up in court. > They, EuroTV.com, publish this data on the public Internet. Johan just > wrote a module to parse that information. I mean, if he was reselling > that information in some way, that would probably be illegal, but > getting sued just for putting out a parser for public information? No > way.
I'm sorry, but there are courts that think differently. And, IMO, rightly so. The fact something is published on the internet doesn't mean it's in the public domain. It's still copyrighted. Grabbing parts of a website and displaying it in a different form is a clear violation of the copyright. Another consideration that matters for courts is that if you don't go to a site to get the information you want, but you a crawler/robot or something like that, you won't see an ad, and the owner of the site displaying the information doesn't have the benefit of the "ad hit". Remember that having one side only the costs (in this case, the publisher of the information) and no benefits is the same reason spammers aren't liked. > On the other hand, I can imagine he's not feeling too good, EuroTV.com > probably has bigger pockets to pay lawyers to threaten him than he has. > > Maybe a bunch of perl people, located in very different locations > throughout the world, could write a module that does the same, just > coded differently, and put all of them on CPAN? Let's see how deep their > pockets are <eg>. Very, very bad idea. Then you would be violating the same copyrights laws that protect the licenses of the modules on CPAN. > Come to think of it, I might do a java version of it, just to exercise > my java muscles a bit. Please don't. Treasure the copyright laws. Defend them. Don't violate them. They are the only laws that will make open source software work. Abigail
