Copyright again

[sunnyweather767]

I had a strong warning from my ISP regarding copyright. Here's the story:
I loaded every morning at 7:30 the televesion programs from a website. It was solely for use in my Homeseer. It is true that this site has the copyright symbol on it. Looking up the definition of coypright gives an amazing and clear insight: the simple fact of saving in your pc, a webpage in the cache is a violation even if you don't have control over the cache!!!
So all of us, using in Homeseer CNN, BBC, Televison programs, weather or newssites are in danger of violating copyright laws!
The possible sanction from my ISP is cutting me off...
Why are there so many public websites that we may not look at???
Marc

[Rupp]

Marc,
Why are you loading this data up to your isp and not your own machine? Can you not run a web server?

[bruce l]

I think your ISP is over reacting. What is the difference from HS loading the page automatically vs you running IE and loading it yourself ?? Now if you are saving that page on external web hosting service to re-serve from you own site that maybe different. I don't think you would infringe copyright on web pages by having them automatically loaded onto a machine at your home for your own personal use. Copyright would be infringed if you tried to sell those pages or re-disribute without compensation to the original authors.


I'm not a lawyer and common sense does not always apply to legal issues.

[electron]

I guess they are more bothered about the 'screen scraping'/data mining than you having an offline copy of the guide. The TV guide site probably looked in their log files to see who is doing this (easy to figure out, just look for the agent string), and take action (they don't know what you do with the data, just that you have an automated process of gathering it which is suspicious).

[cadillackid]

how can someone tell if you are scraping a page versus displaying it on a browser screen? theres no difference in scraping and storing it to a string that gets put into a homeseer device than loading it into IE. how can the web server know the difference? seems the same as putting a URL into a I-frame with a meta refresh tag.
-christopher

[electron]

many bots/crawlers have their own value for the agent field in a GET request, including the MS internet transfer component (or at least used to), so that would be one way. I do not know what a hs.geturl request looks like on the webserver end, so I am not sure about that one. Another way is looking for 'timed requests', automatically filter out ip's which request the same page every x minutes. Last but not least, look for ip addresses which request a page, but do not download any of the associated images or stylesheet (not reliable, but a good start, especially combined with some of the other above mentioned methods).

[Gogs]

I had a strong warning from my ISP regarding copyright. Here's the story:
Marc

Marc, and all others reading this. Perhaps it's time to put this to bed.

In order to impead a copyright you must use it for commercial or personal gain, ie: make money out of it.

Web sites have a copyright in so far as if you copy there "page" and display it as your own creation, then you have enfringed copyright. If you start selling HomeSeer, without licience, and as your own property, you are in breach or Copyright. If you copy HS logo and create a desk top, you are not in breach, as long as you do not make it available to others without permission.

Coyright, and Patent, was set up to protect the rights of the person, and also to allow him or her to reap the benifits and protect against people exploiting there idea.

For years we have downloaded music, infringing the copyright laws, and basically not cared less. So whats the problem here?

For your IP to being suggesting that you are in breach, raises a couple of questions. Firstly, how do they know? They as an IP are not supposed to be "monitoring", as they recently won a court case in the US by claiming they only provide the paltform and are not resonsible for the content.

Let's put this one to bed. It has nothing to do with HS, and at the end of the day we do not wish a load of lawers in here arguing the odds, do we.

You have just given me an idea for my Signature, I'll have to run it past the thwo R's first.

[electron]

ISP's do monitor traffic unfortunately (I believe you are referring to "carrier status"), but in this case, I am pretty sure that the site owner just noticed this happening, and notified the owner of the IP address (ISP in this case) with a violation. Most ISP's play it safe and pass the notice on to the actual offender. Keep in mind that many content providers have a notice somewhere where they do not allow you to retrieve the information using any automated data gathering tool, which is how they could use the 'copyright violation'' excuse. In this case, it's a lot of BS for sure, but I have a feeling it's just a standard (if not automated) notice.

[Skibum]

I find it odd that is that was the case, why didn't the provider of the information simply block your address, and not "report" you and do nothing?

Sounds Fishy to me. Is there more that you are not mentioning?

[sunnyweather767]

Thanks for all the info

Just to make things clear (and put it to bed afterwards!) it is the owner of the site who did the monitoring and who filed a complaint with my ISP. Apparently, what he has 'seen':
Quote:
213.119.142.242 - - [20/Nov/2004:07:29:47 +0100] "GET /index.pl?zender=TV1 HTTP/1.1" 200 18400 "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)" "-"

Unquoite

Besides complaining at my ISP, he also blocked my IP but could do that only for a few days as it is a dynamic one!

I truly hope that I'm the only one with HS who has to cope with a difficult guy and that we all still can enjoy for years the benefits of the marvel of HS!!
Thanks again for all your input.
Marc

[electron]

There is no referrer or agent string, which is what probably tipped him off that you are running software to grab this data. Is this a big company or just a guy that compiles his own stuff? It would be strange if this is a bigger company pestering you about this.

[bruce l]

It's still not a copyright violation as you are using for personal information only. It's a pile of BS! At the worst he doesn't like his bandwidth going to a "bot". Otherwise you did absolutely nothing wrong.

[huggy591]

How about setting IE to pull the page as offline content every night/morning and then it'll pass his test and you'll be fine. How can he argue about that?

The only thing you're doing is not giving him the clicks he wants to satisfy the ad people. He's also probably got a growing number of hits in a statistics column of browser types that he doesn't recognize, or are thought to be a bot. Is there a license agreement that says you can't use an automated method to access the page(s)? That would be the only thing the site owner could complain about, as I see it. If he doesn't like it, he can rewrite his page to deny your browser type from accessing it.

Finally, if this does become a large issue and a thorn in your side, PLEASE PUBLISH THE DATA, THE SITE, AND THE CONTACT PERSON INFO, as well as that of your ISP. I'm sure there are some here who would like to contact them to "understand the issues" as to why they have publicly posted information to be downloaded by browsers but are then telling their customers they can't download the info.

[bruce l]

Gordon - good idea - I may decide to send my browser there fairly often if the site has any usefull information