How I got sued by Facebook (2010)

Re:How I got sued by Facebook (2010) by greendestiny on Friday March 25, 2011 @04:46AM (#2367720)

Someone convince me what facebook said here was wrong. I don't think robots.txt gives you a license to do whatever you want with web content. If it did wouldn't robots.txt effectively put everything into the public domain?

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Re:How I got sued by Facebook (2010) by Animus7 on Friday March 25, 2011 @05:15AM (#2367762)

Google can mine the data and do whatever they want (and I don't doubt for a second that they run analysis on it), but this guy can't?

Facebook wants to have their cake and eat it to. They want free Google publicity but god forbid some dude starts downloading pages for research. It's legal, but it's wrong.

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Re:How I got sued by Facebook (2010) by greendestiny on Friday March 25, 2011 @05:57AM (#2367831)

I'm really only interested in the legal question. And I genuinely would like to be convinced that the legal system would allow scraping like this. I just don't see it.

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Re:How I got sued by Facebook (2010) by mnutt on Friday March 25, 2011 @05:11PM (#2370380)

Gathering information from a website is very different than publishing it verbatim.

I am not a lawyer, but I think it comes down to website Terms of Service enforceability. I don't know what the precedents are, but I would guess that a TOS that went against the nature of how the web is reasonably expected to operate would not stand up in court.

I don't think it's a copyright issue; facts are not copyrightable and by using the data in his research he's not using their presentation of the data.

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Re:How I got sued by Facebook (2010) by greendestiny on Friday March 25, 2011 @05:16PM (#2370398)

Thanks for that, it at least convinces me that its not cut and dried. I think you have a good point about the copyright aspects particularly.

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