At 05:55 PM 2/11/03 +0000, Chris wrote:
Ironically, a year ago on the Perl Whirl I was running some code through the debugger for a class, and it was my own code that parses an online TV guide, builds a database of the next day's shows, and in a separate program, flags shows that I or my wife have been waiting to see. MJD commented that this sounded like a CPAN-worthy module. The reason I didn't submit it was fear of precisely what has happened here.on 08 Feb 2003, [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Henning m�ller-Nielsen) spake thusly:> I do not believe that is the point entirely, and have to agree with > Jan Dubois here: eurotv.com has made the information available for use > in user controlled browsers and they asking, however impolitely, that > we refrain from screenscraping their information. > > As good Internet citizens we should then not do it. Disagree. As a good citizen of the world, one should feel free to scrape the information FOR ONESELF.
As to the comment that "they won't be able to find you", that is nonsense. Given enough resources, they can find anyone. This search would be trivial, and all that would be accomplished would be generating a reputation for CPAN as a warez-house for hackers.
If EuroTV pays to get the information which they then recoup their investment on by packaging it with advertising, that's their right. If you repurpose it without a license for any reason you're taking their information and they have the legal right to object. Arguments about how we're not doing anything more than what an ordinary web browser does are the sort of nerdish legal games that Microsoft got bad publicity for trying in court. The only way you'll win a legal battle is by having better and more expensive lawyers than EuroTV *plus whoever decides to back them*, and we don't, so even if we're right it's a moot point. So let's give this one up and move on.
--
Peter Scott
Pacific Systems Design Technologies
http://www.perldebugged.com/
