[cc-community] question about liscensing and netscraping.
Laura Creighton
lac at openend.se
Sat Aug 4 15:24:51 EDT 2007
Hello, I hope that this is the correct list for this question.
If not, forgive me and point me at the correct one.
My name is Laura Creighton. I am a Python Software Foundation member.
The PSF runs the python.org site, and in particular the python wiki
and PyPI (formerly known as the cheeseshop, but we have lots of
packages now!) which is a repository of python programming language
'packages' -- groups of programs that work together. Some people
produce things they call 'projects' rather than 'packages' but that
is not relevant to this note.
Our PyPI packages come under pretty much every sort of copyright
license. MIT, academic free, apache, and of course GPL being the
most common. I do not think that this is relevant now, but I am
including this for completeness.
We have developed a problem on our site. See:
http://mail.python.org/pipermail/catalog-sig/2007-August/001508.html
for a technical description of our problem. In short English --
a spider is coming and harvesting our wiki, and it is slamming
our site so hard that people cannot download the software
packages we need.
I believe that this is because somebody is re-hosting our content
without our permission so they can get revenue from AdWords. This is
a problem for us. We want to allow people to mirror python.org, and
install copies behind their local firewalls, and indeed copy code and
docs we write there and use it -- in some sense this is what the whole
site is for -- intended for the benefit of all, without restriction.
We never thought about AdWords when we thought about our site,
and now most of us are coming to the belief that using our content
for AdWord revenue does not consist of 'fair use' of our content.
i.e. now that we have done it we think we would like a more
restrictive license, but one that doesn't harm the people who
have been copying us for reasons we consider benign -- such as
'faster access at this university' or 'am behind a firewall' or
even 'sociological research'
We worry that the scrapers will get higher google rankings than we do,
on our content, when we think we deserve the top rating. This is not
simply a matter of ego. We are the reference for the python language,
and want to remain that way. One reason why this is important is
because a lot of our code and docs are being continually updated.
Running obsolete code could make you vulnerable to a security hack (or
other less serious inconvenience), and if you are dealing with a
scraped site copy, you have no way of knowing that the information is
up to date. Or knowing that this is a copy.
Is there a CC license that we could license our wiki under that would
make it possible for us to threaten those who use our wiki in ways we
do not want with a lawsuit? If so, can you point me at what I should
start reading to learn more? English, Swedish Spanish and French
documents gratefully read. The rest I will need to pass to others to
read and explain to me.
Thank you very much for your time,
Laura Creighton
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