Websites Complaining About Screen-Scraping
wilko11 writes "There have been two cases recently where websites have requested the removal of modules from CPAN. These modules could be used to access the websites (EuroTV and Streetmap) from a PERL program. The question being asked on the mailinglists (threads about EuroTV and about Streetmap) is 'can companies dictate what software you can use to access web content from their server?'"
If you don't want your content being redisplayed on another site, place appropriate copyright and seek protections therein.
Don't stifle the technology. Treat the cause, not the symptom.
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
If we piss them off enough by chopping off their advertisements and snipping out their content, they'll just write their sites in Flash, or as one big image file, or some other proprietary format. That'll pretty well dictate what software you use to view their site.
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So far as apps are concerned, again no.
There's no law stating that we have to look at ads. Although I see the problem paying the bills, a flaw in a business model is not the problem of the application coder (namely: me, you, and most people reading this site).
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
Put another way: particularly on a subscription site, the site owners may specify whatever stupid terms and conditions that their subscribers are willing to submit to. That does not mean, though, that the client software is obligated to know whether or not the software itself meets the TOS (nor can I be made to believe that this is possible).
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I can understand how site owners could have a problem with a commercial software product like ExpertGPS wasting their bandwidth while skipping ads. ExpertGPS costs $59.95, but downloads maps from Microsoft's TerraServer without going through its web interface and viewing its advertising. Microsoft hasn't blocked access from these programs yet, but what if they do? All the paying users of ExpertGPS would be out of this functionality.
The solution that has worked best for me...is to avoid public discussion. -- CmdrTaco
I am constantly greeted with messages to the tone of:
How is this any different from what they are attempting to do here?
I hate to disappoint, but I don't think that this is a new precedent. What is a new precedent is the notion that they can request the removal, or to make unavailable, software that is otherwise available
The precedent here is not the software usage to access a website, but the notion that this can be extended to:
... don't put merchandise in the windows.
Just like you can listen to unencrypted radio broadcasts through the airwaves as much as you want, or stand next to a group of people talking and listen in, you can view web pages that are served openly over the Internet.
If you are going to be presenting something for people to observe, they can observe it however they like. Legislate all you want, but this is a fundamental component of logical (as opposed to legal) privacy.
There are a multitude of methods for providing different content based on what the client browser returns on certain environment variables. While I think it's silly to demand that modules be removed from CPAN, it's entirely up to the people running the server to determine who they want to serve content to....and who they dont.
:)
If they can't figure out how to do it serverside (or with clientside scripting) then that's their problem.
That's the bitch about open standards....EVERYONE can use them....
They should do as many of us do and learn a lesson from Google.
It is a violation of Google's terms of use for you to "screen scrape" search results. You can implement their API using a free key and achieve similar results, however.
Not only are these companies approaching the "problem" from the wrong angle in terms of common sense, they are also taking the most difficult approach. It is practically impossible to seek to outlaw software that fetches Web content, because Web browsers and wget (for example) are the same thing, HTTP clients. The HTTP protocol is an open standard that anyone can implement. If you don't want a valid HTTP client accessing your server, don't make your server an HTTP server.
Stated another way, don't try to take an open standard and restrict everyone else's use of it to suit your own needs. You don't see me (an avid soccer player) trying to get the NBA to change the rules of their game to require use of the feet for ball control. If I want to play basketball, I have to play by the rules, else I am not really playing basketball.
This is just another example of gross technical incompetence by executives and lawyers.
A company that attaches an HTTP server receives an HTTP GET request complete with some information in its headers. They have a reasonable case to request that that information be accurate. They have unilateral technical ability to firewall IP's or whole subnets. Otherwise, once they receive a GET request, when the machine that they have configured responds by sending a file, they have granted explicit permission to process that file consistent with the info in the GET request.
The owner of the server is completely in control at a technical level. If they don't like what you are doing, they can firewall you. Absent a contractual agreement not to, you have the permission to send ***REQUESTS*** for anything you would like to request. They can say no. If you lie in your request, then they have a case to say your use is unauthorized, but short of that, there should be no need to have the judicial system rewrite the technology.
I find it sad that so many people seem to think it is just fine to mine their site for data. Sure, there's not all that much that they can do about it, except remove the data or make it harder for regular users of the site to use it.
For example, The EuroTV site seems to work on the concept that they provide the information for free for users of their site, but you can pay them to get it on your site. They're using their site as an advert for their services, while at the same time offering a useful service to the community. By making freely available a system to allow anybody to use their data in their own websites without paying them for it, you're completely ridding them of their reason for having the site up at all.
Yes, you can argue that they shouldn't put the information out there if they don't want people to use it, but then you're giving them a good reason not to put the information out there at all, which makes all of us poorer.
As for whether they can dictate that CPAN remove the modules, certainly it's fair enough of them to request that the module be removed, but it is a shame they leapt to threats of lawsuits quite so quickly.
If content is obtainted in a manner that is not in violation of copyright, the next question is that of fair use. It didn't sound from the article that the either module author intended or enabled anything explicitly unfair for using the data. If the website owner's in questions were objecting strictly to the method with which their web data was being accessed, their arguement holds no water.
This is somewhat similar to the "what constitutes a license" arguement regarding database licenses, the contention being a warm body vs. a connection. In the case of these perl modules, just because there's not a warm body explicitly directing the access of the data should not automatically qualify that access as a breach of copyright.
It would be worth the effort to question both of the website owners as to what exactly did they consider the breach of copyright to be? My guess is that neither of them will be willing or able to express their concerns with enough technical detail or legal specificity to present a valid explanation.
This was not ever realized, I believed mostly because of overpaid "web designers".
But the Semantic Web would require many funny user agents for all kinds of things.
Clearly, if this kind of thinking is allowed to persist in corporate headquarters, it will kill the Semantic Web before it gets started.
I wonder what Tim Berners-Lee thinks about this...
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
One of the biggest sites that I've not seen anyone mention is eBay. Following is in their eula:
Our Web site contains robot exclusion headers and you agree that you will not use any robot, spider, other automatic device, or manual process to monitor or copy our Web pages or the content contained herein without our prior expressed written permission.
You agree that you will not use any device, software or routine to bypass our robot exclusion headers, or to interfere or attempt to interfere with the proper working of the eBay site or any activities conducted on our site.
You agree that you will not take any action that imposes an unreasonable or disproportionately large load on our infrastructure.
Much of the information on our site is updated on a real time basis and is proprietary or is licensed to eBay by our users or third parties. You agree that you will not copy, reproduce, alter, modify, create derivative works, or publicly display any content (except for Your Information) from our Web site without the prior expressed written permission of eBay or the appropriate third party.
Now why they do this is obvious, they have an absolute goldmine of information and they want to be able to take advantage of it when they're good and ready. I assume other sites could adopt this type of eula, which wouldn't make the software itself illegal, but would make using it so (or at least until someone challenges it).
didn't you read the terms of service agreement you were handed at birth (us citizens only) that states any bypassing of ads during receipt of content is theft?
I'm just waiting for ashcroft's goons to knock on my door, find the tivo and haul my ass off to jail.
Everyone's assuming the appropriate rules here are from copyright law, which allow you to protect the expression of an idea but not the idea itself. That's probably right. It's not the way some big organizations want to play.
In the United States, most major sports leagues (NFL, NBA, NHL, MLB, etc.) believe that they own the rights to real time scores, and can permit or restrict any desired use. I ran into this at a previous job: we could "broadcast" football, basketball, and hockey scores at the end of every "period," and baseball scores at the end of every half inning, but we couldn't send updated broadcasts for every new score. That information needed (so said the leagues) to be licensed, and most of it had been exclusively licensed for the medium (Internet) we were interested in.
Do they have a legal leg to stand on? No. (IANAL.) Are they leaning on a great, big, huge stick with nails driven through it? Apparently.
Stupid job ads, weird spam, occasional insight at
Remember when the web -- no, remember when the net was about sharing information? I miss that time. If somebody wrote a cool front end to your service, it was COOL and more power to them. If it made your service (site, whatever) more accessible, that mean more people were looking at your stuff, and that was COOL.
Now we have entities that threaten legal action for accessing the stuff they've made publically available. There may actually be a case when the software scrapes and repackages the content (or, more importantly, redistributes it), but I hope the stuff about decoding the URL for easy use is bogus. I have my doubts that a court will see it my way, but still I hope for reason. Nevertheless, the whole idea makes me sad and nostalgic.
Another thought: is my mozilla vulnerable to this sort of action because it blocks ads -- essentially repackaging the server output for display to me? Now I'm really depressed.
--
bachiatari na torisetsu o yome!
Ahem. Bullshit.
I think this is something we're going to start seeing a lot of in coming years. Right now, the Internet in general is going through growing pains, and the pressure is starting to show in these "free services" type sites ( i.e. Mapquest )
/. I believe others would as well.
I don't know about these site in particular, but many of the big sites around today were built with the failed dot-com business model of delivering free content and selling advertising that ran on the page (or popped up behind it.) This, of course, is dependant on people viewing the site in a browser. If people get the information without using a browser, therefore never seeing the ads, the advertisers won't want to spend any money on the site.
Another problem is, most companies don't want to take the risks associated with innovation, so instead they seek legal action to maintain the good thing they have going. While this is a quick fix, and in the company's best interests, we need companies to present a new business model to the public and see how it gets adopted. I would pay an annual subscription fee for things like Mapquest.com, tvguide.com and maybe even
Porn sites, Ebay auctions, games such as Everquest and services such as Apple's dot-mac are online services that subscribers happily pay for because more than anything, they are quality products(well, some of the porn is). If the company's revenue is coming from its users, they would be a lot less concerned about how the information is being distributed.
This isn't such a radical change, as they could add a premium subscription service, and slowly transition the focus of their business towards it. Wouldn't it be cool if I could write my own mapping application ( or download a pre-made one from the site ) and have it connect to xml.mapquest.com, give my username and password, and retrieve the data I requested.
Hell, the simplest would be an easy reading comprehension or logic test with a short-answer blank - the computer would never get it, and all humans would.
My guess is that soon, people who REALLY want you out will keep you out.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
You know, I think some of you are missing the point in all the technology. I work for a community newspaper publishing company, and we have copyright info at the bottom of every page. I found a guy on google that demonstrates screen scraping techniques using our main news page. That's fine. 99% of the time, it's not a big deal...it's going to happen. What we don't like is when somebody comes along, takes our content, and presents it in questionable environments, like a page that happens to have porn banners on it. Ever hear of "guilty by association"? Frankly, I think it's more likely to happen if screen scraping becomes more commonplace. Honestly... i haven't noticed a drop in traffic when someone does this.
Here is some more info
but they can dictate whether you get the content or not
Yes, they can. They have the option of not putting it on a public webserver in the first place. Beyond that, they have no control over who sees it and how. They can use various technological measures to try to control access, but short of forcing some form of user authentication via a secure proprietary client, the ad-blockers and scrapers *WILL* win.
If they are getting no ad impressions, then they are getting no money.
This statement seems a common way of viewing these issues (Ad blocking, scraping, whatever). However, realize that they don't have a "right" to make money just because they offer otherwise-free content online. They offer that content in the *HOPE* of making money, but that comes with no guarantees. And yes, I go to the kitchen during commercials, or change the station, or fast-forward.
I see the problem as involving how offensive these sites make the ads. I find Flash and Shockwave ads so offensive (and, I find that they often crash my browser - the huge offensive Flash ad currently on the Onion, for example, crashes my browser every time) that I simply browse with them disabled. Pop(up/under) ads bother me enough that I have the "dom.disable_open_during_load" preference set to completely block them. In comparison, the small, unintrusive text ad in the upper left of K5's front page doesn't bother me at all, and I've even *clicked* on it a few times.
Companies (not just advertisers, but those who serve such ads) need to realize that more annoying ads do make an impression - a strongly negative one. If I want their products, *I'll* seek *them* out. If they detract from my web browsing experience, I will specifically make a point of seeking out their *competitors* if I need something they offer.
In case any marketing folks read this, I'll mention the last ad I *DID* watch - The one with the hamster and rabbit from Blockbuster. Why? Because I found the ad sufficiently amusing to watch, on its own merits. Important point there. It didn't annoy me, and it had value all by itself. *THAT* makes a positive impression on a potential customer. I don't even know what the hampster and rabbit talked about, but it doesn't matter, I remember that "Blockbuster amused me for 30 seconds". Making me waste a few minutes to figure out how to filter out your crap does *not* make a good impression. I will remember "X10 pissed me off for 30 seconds, let's visit Logitech's cam offerings instead".
There's no law stating that we have to look at ads.
What about 17 USC 106, which states that barring fair use, etc., the copyright owner has the right to prevent others from creating derivative works of a web page?
Will I retire or break 10K?
I don't believe the discussion is about whether or not screen scrape is feasible for people and whether or not it can be stopped through a bit of intelligence but is instead a discussion of whether or not one company has a right to grab content from a website and redistribute it on their own. Yes, it's possible to stop people from doing aforementioned grab (of course, as this war escalates you're going to have to start shutting real people out of your content) but should people have the legal right to do the grab. Now, what do you think of that question?
I hate liberals. If you are a liberal, do not reply.
ashcroft is a thug regardless of his party affiliation. take of your partisan blinders and understand that patriotism != submission.
Or more related to the point, here are some real-world scenarios:
1. Spammer tries to relay through a machine by looking for well-known CGI. For example, I frequently see requests for /cgi-bin/formail.pl, with the Referer: header set to the name of my domain.
2. Spammer tries to relay through either an HTTP server or HTTP proxy which supports the "CONNECT" method.
Has the owner of the machine explicitly granted spammer permission to (mis-)use his machine, just because a well-known script is present, or because CONNECT is enabled on the wrong side of the internet connection?
I would respectfully disagree.
Hey, Windows users, there is no such thing as "forward" slash, there is only slash and backslash.
If you put something on the web, you have to assume that people are going to access that information in any way that they possibly can.
I suppose the big complaint is that people might not be viewing the "ads" on pages if they use certain HTTP clients.
I have a suggestion for the sites that are complaining. If you don't like it, don't put stuff on the web. Write your own custom client-server solution if you don't want people accessing it with certain browsers or other software.
If you are depending on ad banners for your revenues, you and advertisers are taking a "risk" that people might not see the ads, or that they might not buy advertised products. Tough luck if you lose out on your bet. Hopefully you have a solid way of making money related to whatever service you are providing to make up for it.
Whining about lost ad revenue and such is the same as whining about losing money in Las Vegas. You should have assessed the risks before playing the game.
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
Go Here for discussion last summer over at Perlmonks.
UNIX/Linux Consulting
If a website operator is having their copyrighted content lifted by another site and presented as its own, then that operator can sue using traditional copyright law. If they are having their website slammed because some clueless developer is scraping too often, they can block the IP. But trying to restrict access to the api is heavy-handed and futile.
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Actually, this is a field that is quickly being considered a new Turing test for the computer vision field. It is actually very easy to make pictures that humans can read and that machines currently can't. Look up more info on it here.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
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Thats what I tell my clients who try to "encrypt" things in this silly manner. I've written packages that defeat those silly "enter the word contained in the image" tests, I've written packages that defeat silly anti-automation scripts.
It's really not hard.
Can something that recognizes text in an image be written? Sure. It's just a form of OCR. Can you write one that's able to look at any generic webpage, a mix of text and images, and do what is being asked of a human? I don't believe you can, and it seems a pretty high expectation of any software for the current state of AI. A targeted program for one website I might believe, but such tests for a human are certainly valid protection against web crawling 'bots.
Which is not to say I in any way agree that screen scraping software in any way is a violation of a website owner's rights. It's not.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
EuroTV has a robots.txt file that asks to leave the various /scripts directories alone. If this Perl module is just ignoring that robots.txt file, then that is just rude, although I don't see how it is illegal.
Streetmap doesn't even have a robots.txt file, so I don't see why they are whining about it.
Although I can see why these websites could get upset. The TV-listing screen scrapers are especially bad at hammering a site relentlessly for a sustained period of time to obtain all of the programming information for a certian broadcast area. The scraper has to hit the site repeatedly to obtain all of the information, since it isn't all displayed on a single page. If any one of these scrapers gets to be really popular, it could kill the site.
Of course, the solution to that is to make all of the listing available as one big chunk to avoid repeated requests. But then the site goes out of business in a few weeks due to lack of advertising revenue.
I, for one, wish I could buy a subscription to zap2it.com that would give me fast, easy access to the channel listings in, say, XMLTV format. Is $25/year a reasonable fee, considering that I would only hit the site once a day at the most, and grab a single file?
"Tomorrow's forecast: a few sprinkles of genius with a chance of doom!" - Stewie Griffin
Let's not screw up our legal system with provisions to protect bogus business models. If streetmap.co.uk cannot figure out how to make money putting up information openly on the Internet, then either they should make room for someone who can, or maybe there just isn't a market there.
the spirit of copyright laws are restricting COPYING
The problem here is that a U.S. court decision interpreted a copy in RAM as a "copy" for purposes of copyright law. Thus, when the kernel receives a packet, it COPIES the packet from the network card to the browser's memory, and then the browser COPIES and ADAPTS the HTML into a document tree, COPIES and ADAPTS the document tree into an offscreen bitmap, and COPIES the offscreen bitmap into your video card's RAM.
And if you're arguing fair use, as I said, you better have the money to pay an attorney to back it up.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Gosh, I don't know, but don't I see Google redisplaying site content of billions of pages day in and day out?
Sounds to me like the area's too grey to ascertain right and wrong (I may be, and probably am, ignorant).
However, these sites definately have every right to do whatever they wish in order to prevent such use, such as IP blocking, taking some creative evasive measures, OR... securing content they don't feel Joe Public should consume.
What would happen if say, General Motors suddenly decided that each and every time a GM vehicle shows up in media that it was an abuse of their intellectual property??
Ptttth!
I do feel pissed off every time we catch someone stealing our content and using it in their own tools. Copyright notices and T&C's are all well and good but they do NOTHING to stop someone from trawling your site.
As an owner and publisher I *can* say how my content is to be used because that's the licence I grant, it's MY choice. If I wanted it to be freely copied and used in any way then I would release it into the public domain...and it will be a cold day in hell when that happens.
The information (in our case TV listings) is costly to collect. I guess the spongers don't realise that or they just don't give a fuck.
I've found the solution is to a) implement technology to try to prevent it, and b) complain directly to their ISPs.
Both of the above solutions work but are themselves costly in terms of the technology and the time taken. These are two things we'd rather not spend our time and money on, and they distract us from creating great software.
At the end of the day if everyone trawled web sites for content then there would be no web sites supplying the content. The people trawling often request thousands or tens of thousands of pages in a very short space of time. The costs in terms of bandwidth and slow service to legitimate customers soon add up.
Our downloadable software TV guide (DigiGuide) did in the past have unencrypted data files. We didn't honestly expect someone to take our content and build a (possibly competing ) product around our data but they did. The data is now encrypted and should someone crack the encryption then we just change it and their hard work is wasted.
I feel sorry for web sites like TVGuide.com because they probably think they have some very loyal users that spend a lot of time on their site and read a lot of pages...instead they just have people sucking their content and paying them nothing for it. Ignorance is probably bliss for them.
Well, there are ways to terminate the agreement, but they ain't pretty...
Even if he had provided a tool to make a copy of a map, which he did not, there is nothing at all wrong with making and supplying others with that tool. It's how the tool is used that is the issue, and a tool that has legitimate useful uses can never be allowed to be the target of such a complaint or suit.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
A classic instance is the "deep linking" cases, where somebody doesn't want to let you see their deep pages except by coming through their front page. Rather than taking this to court, as several content providers have done, and beat up on users one at a time, it's much simpler to check the HTTP-REFERER to find out what page the request came from, and send an appropriate response page to any request that doesn't come from one of their other pages. (Whether that's a 404 or a redirect to the front page or a login screen or whatever depends on the circumstances.)
Screen scapers are an interesting case for a couple of reasons. One of them is that blind people often use them to feed text-to-speech browsers, so banning them is Extremely Politically Incorrect, as well as rude and stupid. Another is that anybody with a Print-Screen program on their PC can screen-scrape - you're only affecting whether they get ugly bitmaps or friendlier HTML objects. So you not only have to ban custom-tailored CPAN objects, you have to get Microsoft and Linus to break the screen-grabbers in their operating systems.
The related question "ok, so how *do* I detect and block http requests I don't like?" is left as an exercise to the blocker (and to the people who build workarounds to the blocks, and the people who also block those workarounds, etc...) The classic answers are things like cookies (widely supported "need the cookie to see the page" features seem to be available), ugly URLs that are either time-decaying or dependent on the requester's IP address, etc., or just checking the browser to see which lies it's telling about what kind of browser it is. There's also the robots.txt convention for politely requesting robots to stay away, and Spider traps to hand entertaining things to impolite robots or overly curious humans.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Well, if screen-scraping is illegal (and in some forms, it certainly is), then somebody should sue the people who sell programs that harvest e-mail addresses from web sites.
Ah, no. It is far from the public domain, legally speaking. The author has copyright on the material unless they've explicitly assigned their rights to the public domain. Simply posting material on a website does not accomplish that.
As a content author, they are free to try to their consumers how to consume and use their service (per license, I'm sure). Whether it's *reasonable* or not is another issue entirely.
--Humpty Dumpty was pushed!
You are really thick aren't you.
He wrote a package that happened to incorporate some OCR libraries that someone else wrote. He didn't claim to write the OCR libraries. Also, without his package, the OCR libraries wouldn't be applied to defeating this securtity.
Why do I waste my time with trolls? Why?!
Then I assume such agreements do not apply to c-section kids, do they? Oh the ineffable joy of medical techno... oops... does this make c-section DMCA circumvention device? =8-Z
My other Beowulf cluster is... er...
If they dont want people to use the information the way they do, why the hell are they publishing it on servers connected to a network not controlled by them...
I mean seriously, are they now telling us what packets and requests we are allowed to send over the internet?
By hosing an internet server they are accepting people can connect to it and send the data they like. If they dont like it, they should try and outsmart people with clever protecting software, or host it on their own private lans.
It all comes down to money and the models people have used to force advertizements onto people while they are entertained or eduacted.
the cold, hard truth is that the digital future obviates the traditional content control mechanisms used to force consumers to watch ads for content. The exact same lines are playing out on the web, on TV, in music, movies, magazines -- everywhere informationcan be digitized and presented in ways not tied to physical mediums.
The (now old) business models that the digital methods circumvent will eventually be redefined. Short term laws will support them, because the industries have eough money and clout to cause the laws to happen. Long term, though, people will no longer stand for the absurd, one-sided contract with society that is our current IP system.
This a vague comment, quickly written -- but I see here the exact same theme played out over and over in recent years. Free communication (amortized) + 'digitizable' items of value => lack of control by provider for profits. This is yet another example.
Under the current state of US law, unauthorized access to a computer system is a federal crime. (I can't speak to EU laws, but I suspect parallels exist.) If Company X says, "You must use Internet Explorer 5.5 to access this site," then you must use IE 5.5. Of course, it would be just plain stupid to do so, but it's their computer system, and they get to decide who is authorized.
To judge from most of the comments here, the fact that it is incredibly stupid to impose such restrictions has obscured what is actually a legally unambiguous situation. Just because it's dumb doesn't mean it's not legal.
That an http server is nominally "public" doesn't mean diddly here. Any number of http servers provide for member- or employee-only access. The brick and mortar parallel would be those signs that say things like, "No shirt, no shoes, no service."
It is surprising that so few people have touched on the reason why companies might object to the distribution of Perl modules designed to harvest data from their sites: bandwidth costs and site performance. It doesn't take too many cron jobs banging on a site every minute -- and being ignored by their users most of the time -- to degrade site performance for "live" users and run up steep bandwidth bills.
Now, there is certainly no legal basis for Company X to demand that CPAN remove the modules, though it is hardly out of line to ask nicely. But there is firm legal grounds to prohibit anyone from actually using those modules.
Legal action is probably the wrong way to handle this, though. Having written fairly complicated web scrapers before, I know how easy it would be to make a site virtually impossible to harvest. Rather than make a big stink about the Perl programmers who contribute to CPAN, Company X would be well-advised to hire a good Perl programmer to thwart automated harvesters.
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