[Foundation-l] Dealing with Live-mirrors

Erik Moeller erik at wikimedia.org
Wed May 30 14:02:09 UTC 2007


On 5/30/07, Mathias Schindler <mathias.schindler at 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.
-- 
Peace & Love,
Erik

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