I am not going to discuss whether the use of Pete's pages is morally right or wrong and whether someone should have asked before including them in a frame. I will address a few things of interest though. First, you originally reported 'screen scraping' which, as it turns out, this clearly is not. Screen scraping would be the use of a bot to take information from your site and serve it on another site or though another application. This is not happening, the inclusion of your site in a frame is not screen scraping and there is a huge difference. Screen scraping is easy to block by IP as there is a bot which is doing the scraping. Frames are a much bigger problem because the requests are distributed and come from end users. Actually they don't look different from normal requests for your pages so I'm curious as to how you know this is going on in the first place? There could be lots of other things causing unusual load...
Peter Loveall wrote: > Any use of IFrames without the prior consent of the web site owner is, > IMO, abuse. It is also the opinion of most hosting companies. Yes, > the pages are copyrightable. I never claimed that the information was > copyrighted, only the pages and use of them in any form on another web > site is a violation of the copyright. > Pete, I suggest you talk to a lawyer familiar with Internet law who is likely to tell you the same thing I am about to. I think your case would be difficult if not impossible to win. In this case the person who created the framed page is actually doing no infringing at all, it is the user's browser which is actually loading your site--directly from your server-- while you may not like this it is far from clear that 1) any infringing of copyright is even taking place and 2) if infringement was taking place it would be the user's browser doing it (albeit at the request of the remote site so there might be inducement). All in all your legal leg is shaky at best and most likely non-existent. > It amazes me how many people in this day and age believe it is > their "right" to use another person's work without prior consent and > how many people such as yourself are so quick to defend such > irresponsible behavior. > It amazes me how many people in this day and age complain that someone else is promoting their work and how many people completely mis-understand the purpose and mission of copyright, trademarks, patents and laws in general. The Internet is built on the foundation of, and has been successful by, challenging the status quo. Many of the innovations in computers and electronics exist for the same reason. It is unclear what information you are trying to protect and why. Keeping information locked simply because you can is an elitist attitude from a previous era which I thought we had done away with, especially in the United States. It's unfortunate that people still feel this is acceptable. It's not that I don't see your point about an auto-refresh sucking away system resources being problematic. I agree this can and does present a problem for a webserver but not one that can't be overcome in many different ways bound to be more productive than complaining about it here. 73, Ben Franske K0BEN
