in reply to Re: Framework for News Articles
in thread Framework for News Articles

Then they should put a robot.txt file on their website and of course all well-behaved robots check that and apply it.

CountZero

"If you have four groups working on a compiler, you'll get a 4-pass compiler." - Conway's Law

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Re: Re: Re: Framework for News Articles
by biosysadmin (Deacon) on Mar 24, 2004 at 23:39 UTC
    While robots.txt is an established standard for regulating the behavior of robots, the non-existence of a robots.txt is not a license to violate copyright. Many sites would want robots from Google and other search engines to index their pages, but they don't want any random person scraping their content and putting it up on another site. You could make a case for downloading content for personal use, but there's definitey gray areas out there.

    The moral of the story is that the legality definitely depends on the use of downloaded information.

[reply]
      I entirely agree.

      It raises some interesting questions though: what would be the legal status of data in a proxy-server or cache? Does it violate copyright?

      CountZero

      "If you have four groups working on a compiler, you'll get a 4-pass compiler." - Conway's Law

[reply]

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