* Jan Dubois <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [2007-11-28 02:50]: > This has come up before (e.g. the WWW::EuroTV removal request > in 2003). I still have the same opinion I had back then: > > | I think this discussion is missing the point. It should not > | be: "What can we legally get away with?", but "Do we have the > | courtesy to respect the wishes of publishers of > | information?", even if their wishes might not be legally > | enforceable. > | > | Since this is about Perl advocacy, I would like to quote a > | bit of Perl culture: "It [Perl] would prefer that you stayed > | out of its living room because you weren't invited, not > | because it has a shotgun." > | > | I think the same rules should apply for screenscrapers too: > | If website owners don't want their pages to be scraped, then > | people shouldn't do it and get their information elsewhere. > | It is like honoring a robots.txt file. It is probably not > | enforceable, but it is the right thing to do.
Mostly, I agree. However, there are a number of courtesies in play here beyond the one you mention. Note that we are talking about many more parties than just the site owners and the author of the module. We are also talking about CPAN administrators and the CPAN mirror adminstrators. It is more than courteous of all of them not to take action against the interests of a module author on behalf of a third party without verifying the third party’s demands as legitimate and reasonable. “My freedom ends where yours begins” goes both ways. Also, your quote about the shotgun very much applies: the site owners sent a Cease and Desist. If they escalate to legal weapons, I am inclined to respond by examining their demand on legal grounds. If instead they *asked* the module author to please remove the module, and the module author himself in turn *asked* the CPAN administrators and CPAN mirror administrators to respect his wish to comply with the wish of the site owners, that would make for a very different situation and I would be readily willing to forgo formalities. But Paul Grinberg has yet to surface to say anything for himself, and while it may well be that the site owners tried asking him first, I can only go by the fraction of the story that I know about. Regards, -- Aristotle Pagaltzis // <http://plasmasturm.org/>
