[mythtv-users] Free US/Canada Listings

[Jay R. Ashworth]

On Fri, Sep 07, 2007 at 10:18:49PM +1000, David Segall wrote:
> Jay R. Ashworth wrote:
> > On Thu, Sep 06, 2007 at 11:39:34PM +1000, David Segall wrote:
> >>> How many of them are legal to scrape?
> >> All of them! If scraping was against any State or Federal law then 
> >> Google would be in jail. Your next question is "Could the site sue me 
> >> for violating their copyright or their terms of service?" The answer is 
> >> possibly yes but the most they could obtain is the negligible amount you 
> >> cost them by scraping. In any case, they would write to you first asking 
> >> you to stop and I suggest you agree because they probably have "free" 
> >> in-house lawyers and you don't.
> > 
> > This used to be true.

> Exactly which sentence in my post is (now) not true?

"All of them".  "Legal" implies "criminal law".  Below, you agree with
me that not all copyright law is civil anymore.

> > Copyright used to be *strictly* a civil issue.
> > 
> > It's not anymore.

> Those two sentences are true. If scraping is an illegal copyright 
> infringement Google could not escape prosecution simply because no one 
> is complaining about their activities. Not only are they scraping but 
> they are storing the result of their scraping in their own database and 
> they are reformatting it and profiting from the results. They are doing 
> exactly what a MythTV user wants to do except that the only "profit" for 
> a MythTV user is having a locally stored TV Guide.

In fact, Google is embroiled in half a dozen lawsuits about copyright
issues.  Copyright law is *extremely intricate*, and "Google is doing
it an nod having officers arrested" is not a valid premise for the
argument "violating copyright law will *not* get you arrested".

Cheers,
-- jra
-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                   Baylink                      jra at baylink.com
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