Tag Archives: Copyright

Cory Doctorow’s Microsoft Research DRM talk … in Italiano e in MP3

Scraping a site is ethical?

At =-” href=”http://alex.halavais.net/news/archives/000798.html”>Rolan the Datapimp, Alex asks himself if collecting orkut.com data automatically with a script is legal or ethical.
Actually I scraped Epinions.com site for data and I don’t care too much about this nonsense copyright mess.
I really don’t understand these strange licences (or ToS, Term of Service). Could I say that this site can be accessed only on thursday if the humidity is above 3 something? That the email I send you can be read only with a certain program and only between 3pm and 4pm?
I totally agree with Alex when he says
… I could pay a few students minimum wage to record this data manually. Would that be acceptable? What if I had them sit in a lab and hit each page, saving a local copy? This would appear exactly the same as a scraper to Orkut, and would yield exactly the same results, but would presumably be acceptable.
Basically, I think noone can tell me how I can experience some digital content. I agree with World of Ends
You are never going to prevent us from copying the bits we want.

Reminder for myself: I need to open a webpage with “impossible-to-accomplish licences and ToS”.

SongBuddy and Decentralized Music

1 Reply

Yes, YASN (Yet Another Social Network). Have you noticed that Add as a friend is the most common link in websites created these days?
Anyway, this time we have SongBuddy. Social software + online music: an explosive pair!
SongBuddy is a new way to find music that’s already available on the Internet. By finding songs on bands’ and labels’ sites and sharing the address of those songs with your friends, you can explore music you’ll love that you wouldn’t hear anywhere else. So sign up, make some friends and list some music. You won’t even need to install any software, SongBuddy works with your current media player.
Here my profile.
SongBuddy also produces a FOAF file representing your friends and uses the MusicBrainz RDF namespace.
The term of service is also very good!
Unless otherwise specified, all content on this site is copyright SongBuddy LLC. You may use the data on this site under the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 1.0 Creative Commons license.