How I got sued by Facebook

"my lawyer advised me that it had never been tested in court, and the legal costs alone of being a test case would bankrupt me."<p>This is a very real problem with law surrounding emerging business practices, esp here in the US.<p>Ultimately you can only pioneer whatever you can afford to defend in court. Facebook, or any other BigCo for that matter, can assert that you can't do X and it's up to you to fight it in court... Even if there is prior behavior such as with this case. Clearly Google does the very same job and doesn't have an agreement with Facebook to spider their site.<p>But if you can't afford to defend it and bring up the prior examples in a court, then Facebook - or anyone else for that matter - can stop you.

"Their contention was robots.txt had no legal force and they could sue anyone for accessing their site even if they scrupulously obeyed the instructions it contained. The only legal way to access any web site with a crawler was to obtain prior written permission."<p>This is ridiculous. Can someone release the data so this can be tested in court? EFF?

Facebook was founded by an outlaw scraper. Game recognize game, they're just neutralizing a threat, don't worry about the legal window dressing.<p>Read about Zuck's wget magic here, and how he illegally scraped (guarantee it was a TOS violation) all the Harvard online facebooks in 2003: <a href="http://www.scribd.com/mobile/documents/538697" rel="nofollow">http://www.scribd.com/mobile/documents/538697</a><p>As Balzac said, behind every great fortune lies a great crime :)

Legal precedent: "Copiepresse (Belgian Newspaper Conglomerate) v. Google (Read more.. ). Filed in August, 2006.<p>Claims: to remove all the content indexed by Google's crawlers on the newspaper's websites."<p><a href="http://www.infoniac.com/offbeat-news/google-list-of-class-action-lawsuits.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.infoniac.com/offbeat-news/google-list-of-class-ac...</a><p>Google's response: "Of course, if publishers don’t want their websites to appear in search results (most do) the robots.txt standard (something that webmasters understand) enables them to prevent automatically the indexing of their content. It's nearly universally accepted and honoured by all reputable search engines."<p><a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/09/about-google-news-case-in-belgium.html" rel="nofollow">http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/09/about-google-news-cas...</a><p>May be you can get Google to file an amicus brief...<p>"Outcome: Google had to remove the plaintiff's newspaper content from its database within 10 days or face fines of 1,000,000 Euro per day. Google had to publish "in a visible and clear manner and without any commentary from her part the entire intervening judgment on the home pages of google.be and of news.google.be for a continuous period of 5 days within 10 days... under penalty of a daily fine of 500,000 Euro per day of delay". Google had was awarded the costs of the expenses of 941.63 Euro (summons) and 121.47 Euro (costs of thy proceedings)."

I've been beaten into oblivion before for speaking out about the way I see the future shaping up re Big Corporations owning our information but I'll take my chances and use this opportunity to speak out against Facebook again. In truth, I did invoke Orwell...<p>I'm no Facebook hater, I actually use Facebook often but when they pull these kind of stunts it really upsets me. I would imagine it would upset most freedom lovers on this site as well. When Facebook decides to take a smattering of our data and make it "Public" how then do they decide to control that data after the fact? Since when did Facebook re-define the word "Public"? It's like your cell phone provider and ISP redefining "unlimited". This stuff has to stop. Getting back to Facebook, since when does merely browsing to a URL(I) enter you into some sort of binding contract with the publisher?

Wait, from reading the article it appears he didn't get sued by Facebook (they just threatened to sue).<p>There's a difference.

<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications_v._Rural_Telephone_Service" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications_v._Rural_Tel...</a>

How about crawling search engines? For example, instead of crawling directly on facebook, crawl on a search engine with "site:facebook.com".<p>In that case, your data is gathered from the search engine and has nothing to do with facebook any more. And I doubt the search engine will sue you for using their service.

I'm surprised that shutting up about this wasn't part of the agreement, either that or he's violating it. I've never heard of a settlement that didn't involve keeping your mouth shut.<p>I'm glad he posted about it though, that legal issue regarding robots.txt is good to know.

He is not publishing the data as is. he is publishing his work done over the data.<p>or am i wrong?<p>Now can't i publish my thesis because it contains information i got from copyrighted books?