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

[Geoffrey Plourde]

A bot or bots calling up massive amounts of data at high speed can have a negative effect on a server. While I doubt the bot we use would have the power to take down a Google server, the speed of the requests and the constant number of requests will definitely be noticeable, possibly leading to unpleasant consequences. 




________________________________
From: Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net>
To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List <foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
Sent: Saturday, June 20, 2009 5:07:44 PM
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Info/Law blog: Using Wikisource as an Alternative Open Access Repository for Legal Scholarship

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
>  


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