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Facebook Crawler Speaks Back
Last week we ran a story about Facebook suing to get a crawled dataset offline. This week we have a bit of a
response written by Pete Warden, the guy who actually did the crawling. He followed robots.txt, and then Facebook's lawyers went after him. It's actually a quite interesting little tale and worth your time.
Mark Zuckerberg is the most unethical guy in the industry today. As is obvious by the origins of Facebook, his infamous hacking of the journalists passwords during the the-facebook era and countless other fiascoes that come to news from time to time. Everyone who has ever dealt with him says have bad things to say about him.
If he is the face of the next generation entrepreneurs, then god saves the industry.
matter if he doesn't have the big $ needed to hire lawyers
Thank you. I ran an open source project for a few years and came home one night to find to find that my webhost had taken its site down after being contacted by a company with a similar name. The company claimed they'd tried to contact me, explained how my project was causing them harm, but the simple fact of the matter was that my project's name did not infringe on theirs.
I ended up renaming the project. I've told the story dozens of times, and the response is always the same. "That's BS! They can't do that! Go to court!" People don't understand that $20 a month in unmanaged Google ads doesn't cover lawyers the same way that company's actual paying customers do.
Whale
how about if he rejigged his crawler to get the data from the google cache instead? So he'd never get anything from facebook or enter into any implied agreement with them.
It takes a babe in the woods to think he can just waltz in and take that away with a "But your robot.txt didn't say I *couldn't* do it" defense, without expecting a big legal fight.
Yes. Apart from anything else, he's just about entirely missing Facebook's point. Facebook don't give a shit how he accesses their site; this has nothing to do with the fact that he spidered it in a way that their robots.txt file allows, and everything to do with the fact that he was *redistributing their data* without consent.
Now, the question becomes whether what he was distributing falls under fair use. This is a very tricky question, and has nothing to do with how he acquired it.
American justice might be blind, but it know what money smells like. One more reason why we need judicial reform to prevent abuses like this. Of course fighting it wouldn't be worth it, as even if you won, your "winnings" would have only been the ability to continue using the name. Another good example is http://www.nissan.com, where he actually fought and won, at a great price. His name is Nissan, and his computer business and name existed back when the cars were called "Datsun", but they sued anyway. This is another one of those "We are bigger than you, thus more deserving of the domain name than you" cases.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
If they want to sell data (as they clearly do given that's what their business model is built upon) then they should take greater precautions to ensure that it is protected. If they leave that information out in the open, for anyone with a hint of insight to find, then they should not be surprised to find their valuable data in the hands of someone else. He didn't delve into their private information - he simply accessed publicly available information that anyone with an internet connection could view.
Facebook got lucky - the data was gathered by just an average Joe without the backing to fight a legal battle. Had it been someone significantly larger, the result may have been "go ahead and sue - we'll see you in court." And, quite frankly, I'd be shocked if Facebook would win that sort of battle. And that's a battle that Facebook decidedly does not want to lose - it would mean the end of their business...
I'd be curious to learn if that information is still available (as I am certain it is...) because someone/some company might decide that's pretty valuable _PUBLIC_ information and might, just might, decide they're willing to battle Facebook's legal team for it... Expensive legal battle over very valuable marketing data... If you have the resources for the fight, it might be a fight worth waging...
Facebook may have gotten lucky once but they may not be so lucky next time...