Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: I Require Permission

Author:Dave Winer
Posted:9/2/1999; 3:12:00 PM
Topic:Automated deep linking
Msg #:10477 (In response to 10476)
Prev/Next:10476 / 10478

What possible legal ground can there be to prevent trolling a database?

None. Lawrence Lee posted a pointer to a Cal Law article about database copyright protection. In the US, no such protection exists. In Europe, there is a law, but it only extends to countries that have equivalent laws. In other words, it's a mess. That's why NSI's legend is so ridiculous. There's no legal ground to it. (And they keep changing it! Today it isn't even good English!) We could crawl their database and parse it, and mirror it, and there's nothing they could do about it. (Well, of course they could sue, but it would be a frivolous lawsuit.)

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