Geoffrey Plourde wrote:
If a bot has a meaningful effect on server load (i.e. page requests), it falls under the category of malicious software, which is highly illegal.
Malicious software or overloading servers goes well beyond ignoring a ToS. Why should downloading whole books from Google have any greater effect on server load than downloading a whole book of similar length from Internet Archive?
Ec
From: Ray Saintonge
Brian wrote:
That is against the law. It violates Google's ToS.
I'm mostly complaining that Google is being Very Evil. There is nothing we can do about it except complain to them. Which I don't know how to do - they apparently believe that the plain text versions of their books are akin to their intellectual property and are unwilling to give them away.
How is violating Google's ToS against the law? Sites put all sorts of meaningless garbage into these documents, and users mostly ignore them.
Of course Google's evil; it's about time that people noticed that. They use their deep pockets as a way to bully other sites ... with a smile. Fortunately the U.S. does not have database protection laws like the E.U. Ideally, every PD item they host should also be hosted on an alternative site, but that's a massive undertaking, ... and they know it. Nothing requires them to be nice to the competition, such as by making it easy to copy their material.
Ec