On 4/9/06, Neil Harris neil@tonal.clara.co.uk wrote:
Real-time mirrors seem to be a recurring phenomenon. They are a drain on Wikipedia's resources, and hunting them and shooting them down is a continuing battle.
The reasoning behind these mirrors appears to be:
1 putting up a Wikipedia mirror with ads will make money... 2 too lazy to set up a proper mirror... 3 instead, set up a script that queries Wikipedia in real time... 4 profit!
However; why not turn this on its head, and offer a real-time, or near-real-time, Wikipedia feed service to paid-up subscribers?
...
Good idea, or bad idea?
-- Neil
From a business perspective, what is to stop a site from sucking in
just enough to mirror in real-time, and then turning around and forwarding it to other mirrors? In an extreme case, there would be only one customer of this service (paying say $1000) and they in turn might have multiple customers of their own (say 11m paying say $100); the original customer will turn a profit just from reselling the feed, the secondary customers will save major amounts of money, and all benefitting from advertising. I doubt we could prohibit it contractually, and even if we could, suing fly-by-night outfits would be tough, even in addition to the PR aspects.
~maru