[Labs-announce] A reminder about Terms of Use

[Marc A. Pelletier]

Hello Labs,

I would like to remind all of you that - in addition to the Labs' terms
of Use[1] to which you have all agreed - it is important that all Labs
users also abide the Terms of Use of any external resource they may be
accessing as well as any applicable data reuse licenses.

This holds doubly true of automated processes which may cause those
resources undue load or stress, and may perform activities prohibited by
those resources such as recursive download, automated access, and so on.

For instance, we have recently received a complaint from a small website
that a job running on Tool Labs has collected their entire data
recursively, costing them a great deal of bandwidth and causing serious
inconvenience.

This is, of course, entirely unacceptable.

As volunteers and participants in the Wikimedia movement, it behooves us
to be good "Internet neighbours" by being careful to not only respect
others' properties, but in being conservative and careful about avoiding
accidentally causing issues with other Internet resources.

Please be especially careful in the future whenever you are considering
using an external resource from within your Labs project.  Ensure that
you abide those resources' terms of use, be mindful of the bandwidth and
resource usage of your tools, and - if there is any doubt - please
contact the owner of those resources and *ask* first.

If you have any doubt about how intensive something to propose to do may
be, please contact a Labs admin.  We'll be happy to counsel you in the
matter.

-- Marc