Reasonable use of DMCA? Or another brick in the walled garden?
These questions aside I find use of DMCAs to be a bit egregious lately, with little protection being afforded while much has been done to raise the unworldly punishments wrought on copyright complaints increasing fines to the point where they mirror court settlements for financial firms.
Sure, but why? I'm sure they love the search traffic that Google gives them. I'm not so sure they love someone scraping an internal in-store pick up API to analyze their inventory and cause incidents of "What do you mean you don't have the 64 GB Gold iPhone 5S for Verizon!? This website says you have it in stock!"
Aside this thread, I'm not familiar with apple-tracker.com, however 'Froogle' (Google's shopping part of it's search engine) does do product searches, availability and price matching.
Note that this is not a DMCA notice, as it does not have to do with copyright; however, despite following a DMCA notice template, it doesn't actually claim to be, except for this nonsensical sentence:
"I have a good faith belief that the removal of copyright management information from the material listed above is not authorized by law."
Importantly, facts are not copyrightable (/Feist v. Rural/ was the Supreme Court decision that cemented this into the case law), so not only is this not a DMCA notice, the DMCA -- as best I understand -- couldn't possibly apply here.
Now, a cease and desist from scraping would be completely within their rights to do -- as far as I understand, nobody's come to any consensus as to whether terms of use are legally enforceable, but given the way aaronsw's case was going, I'm not convinced that a court would back this use of Apple's site.
Hey Mordy you're sure to stop by and read this at some point so this appeal is to you:
Please put your code up on GitHub. sed -i 's/Apple/aFruit/g' if you'd feel better about it that way, but fuck Apple and allow people to run their own Heroku app if they'd like.
We need a list, somewhere on wiki, to collect all these notices and store them forever. Then one day when I'm working on a next venture round and the law firm comes knocking, trying to "help" me for the sizable chunk of this funding, I'll quickly run their name. And will tell them "guys, I'm trying to innovate, you're trying to kill innovation. You're not friends, you're foes. Go away, #$%$%#$%^$^" :-)
I'm sure Apple's money are not my measly $50K, but there're not enough Apples for all the law firms out there...
There is one. The Chilling Effects database has collected them for some time, though the contents aren't collected automatically, they're submitted voluntarily. The database contains mostly DMCA takedown notices, but also several other types of cease and desist orders.
You can search by field[1], including sender, though note that many won't contain a law firm as the sender since many companies farm out their DMCA complaints to companies that do nothing but file mass automated complaints (which gets you things like Microsoft demanding that Google remove links to pages on microsoft.com[2]).
1) It's hardly sudden.
2) People who buy Apple products aren't buying technology as much as they are buying into a culture that features technology as a badge of identification; they'll "know where to buy [Apple] stuff" whether or not this site exists.
A few years ago I set up a twitter account, @MacRefurb. It's a kludge that linked refurb-tracker.com's scraper to twitter via some RSS-to-tweet service that I can't even remember where to login now.
It's been running for over 4 years now and nary a DMCA peep. I guess it's just off Apple's radar.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 71.5 ms ] threadThese questions aside I find use of DMCAs to be a bit egregious lately, with little protection being afforded while much has been done to raise the unworldly punishments wrought on copyright complaints increasing fines to the point where they mirror court settlements for financial firms.
DMCA is not the correct tool for this.
Just a standard run-of-the-mill cease and desist.
[4] Reason:
Content Type / Violation: Automated scraping/copying/acquiring web app, operating in violation of the apple.com Internet Service Terms of Use
Google doesn't do what apple-tracker.com was doing.
Clearly, this service doesn't.
This is probably more about their supply chain management around the country than how they are getting the information.
"I have a good faith belief that the removal of copyright management information from the material listed above is not authorized by law."
Now, a cease and desist from scraping would be completely within their rights to do -- as far as I understand, nobody's come to any consensus as to whether terms of use are legally enforceable, but given the way aaronsw's case was going, I'm not convinced that a court would back this use of Apple's site.
Please put your code up on GitHub. sed -i 's/Apple/aFruit/g' if you'd feel better about it that way, but fuck Apple and allow people to run their own Heroku app if they'd like.
I'm sure Apple's money are not my measly $50K, but there're not enough Apples for all the law firms out there...
https://www.chillingeffects.org/notice.cgi
You can search by field[1], including sender, though note that many won't contain a law firm as the sender since many companies farm out their DMCA complaints to companies that do nothing but file mass automated complaints (which gets you things like Microsoft demanding that Google remove links to pages on microsoft.com[2]).
[1] http://chillingeffects.org/search.cgi
[2] http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/09/microsofts-copyri...
I am happy that those kind of sites are taken down. Full of ads. They ruin the interwebs. Or am I missing anything?
It's been running for over 4 years now and nary a DMCA peep. I guess it's just off Apple's radar.