On 5/30/07, Mathias Schindler mathias.schindler@gmail.com wrote:
As far as I know, we are constantly blocking people when they are live-mirroring Wikipedia (instead of downloading the dump or negotiating a data feed). Apart from that, there is no consequence for the people running a live mirror. I remember at least one instance in which the person running the mirror tried to change IP addresses faster than they were blocked.
The problem with serving advertising is that the third party users will simply filter it. They typically already rewrite the HTML in order to adapt it to whatever context they use it in. Then we end up in the same situation we have right now, except with additional management complexity of tracking down the "ad-filtering" live feeds.
It may make more sense to serve a standard message on every hit "This site is hotloading Wikimedia content, which is not permitted. The site administrator is encouraged to contact us at FOO to negotiate hot loading conditions."
In general, I think the right way to negotiate such agreements is to have revenue sharing deals.