Copying information from the Internet

From WhyNotWiki

Contents 1 Aggregate web applications 2 Legality of scraping/copying web sites 3 Examples of people who copy from web sites 4

[edit] Aggregate web applications

Aggregate web applications  edit

http://www.sheppardmullin.com/images/pubs/pub596.PDF Legal Issues regarding mashups

[edit] Legality of scraping/copying web sites

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scraper_site. Retrieved on 2007-05-11 11:18.

Because scraper sites take content from other sites without the permission of the original creators, they frequently violate copyright law. It is illegal to republish copyrighted material without the copyright holder's permission. This applies regardless of whether the material was originally published on a blog, a mailing list, or any other less-formal medium, just as much as if it were commercially published.

Even taking content from an open content site can be a copyright violation, if done in a way which does not respect the license. For instance, the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) and Creative Commons ShareAlike (CC-BY-SA) licenses require that a republisher inform readers of the license conditions, and give credit to the original author. Most scraper sites which copy GFDL- or CC-BY-SA-licensed content do not do this, and therefore are infringing copyright law.

[edit] Examples of people who copy from web sites

http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/Synsets is an exact point-in-time copy

This article is copied from an article on Wikipedia® - the free encyclopedia created and edited by online user community. The text was not checked or edited by anyone on our staff. Although the vast majority of the Wikipedia® encyclopedia articles provide accurate and timely information please do not assume the accuracy of any particular article. This article is distributed under the terms of GNU Free Documentation License.

That page was obviously cached (rather than being retrieved on-the-fly) (they don't provide the cache / as-of date), because it was out-of-date compared with its source, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synonym_ring . I wonder how often they crawl Wikipedia and make copies of their pages...

[edit]

Fair use  edit   (Category  edit)

Aliases: Fair use of Internet sources, Fair use of content from the Internet, Copying information from the Internet, Mashups (at least for now, there's no point in making a separate article about them)