[Foundation-l] Info/Law blog: Using Wikisource as an Alternative Open Access Repository for Legal Scholarship

[Geoffrey Plourde]

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.




________________________________
From: Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net>
To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List <foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
Sent: Saturday, June 20, 2009 2:35:52 PM
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Info/Law blog: Using Wikisource as an Alternative Open Access Repository for Legal Scholarship

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

_______________________________________________
foundation-l mailing list
foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l