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Facebook Crawler Speaks Back

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the everybody-litigate-now dept.

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.

6 of 317 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Mark Zuckerberg by Ornlu · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    If he is the face of the next generation entrepreneurs, then God save the industry.

    There. Fixed that for ya.

  2. Re:Mark Zuckerberg by Pojut · · Score: 1, Offtopic

    Capitalizing god's name means applying a human characteristic to an omnipotent and all-powerful force...in other words, it's as silly as applying one sex or the other to god.

    --
    Living With a Nerd
  3. Re:Pretty naive by Shakrai · · Score: 1, Offtopic

    Only People (persons, not legal entities)who are eligible to vote can donate to political campaigns.

    For the most part (PACs are the exception, one that needs to be closed, IMHO) that's already the case.

    --
    I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
    We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
  4. Re:Pretty naive by toastar · · Score: 1, Offtopic

    Only People (persons, not legal entities)who are eligible to vote can donate to political campaigns.

    So no first amendment rights til you turn 18 then?

  5. Re:Pretty naive by Animaether · · Score: 1, Offtopic

    They can use corporate money to pay for advertisements advancing their agenda. They can not give corporate money directly to a political campaign.

    And the subtle distinction is?

    Joe gives Marc $10,000 and Marc makes advertisement X for $10,000
    Joe goes to Marc, asks what advertisement Marc wants, Marc says 'advertisement X', Joe spends his $10,000 and make advertisement X

    Maybe they're limited in what -else- they can do with that money - as opposed to giving it to the campaign and then having that campaign group use it to buy many gallons of beer - but for the most basic of campaigning methods, i.e. advertising, the distinction seems far too subtle to even be noteworthy.

    So what did I miss?

  6. Re:Copyright? by element-o.p. · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    By that logic, I should be legally allowed to redistribute every MP3 I ever downloaded from Amazon.com. I'd like to see how that argument would fly in front of a judge.

    --
    MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?