Re: "Legal Terms of Service" advice please
On Wed, Jan 24, 2001 at 01:15:31PM -0800, Rick Younie wrote:
> I've written a script to query Geocrawler's Debian archives from
> the command line rather than their web interface. I'm modifying
> the script to add features and noticed the following blurb on
> their site; http://www.geocrawler.com/legal/
>
> [... legal notices and other junk unrelated to your script deleted ...]
>
> The second paragraph is a little scary. It would seem prudent to
> ask for permission to distribute the script, yes?
No. You only need permission from the script's copyright holder in order to
distribute it. In this case, you are probably the sole copyright holder and
can give yourself permission.
> It's a little
> late though.
Assuming there was even a very remote chance you had to get permission in
the first place, it would be impossible to appologize after the fact and
claim you didn't know if you asked up front and were denied. In most
situations, this would be a poor argument, however in your situation it's
foolish to ask permssion before following a course of action that is clearly
your right.
>
> I'd expect to get permission, given the company. Any advice on
> how to word the email?
>
> Email replies ok but I'm on the list.
>
Your program is a user-agent just like any other. You need no more get
permission than the Mozilla dev team would need to get permission to
distribute their browser because it could be used to access
<http://www.geocrawler.com/>.
--
Brian Ristuccia
brian@ristuccia.com
bristucc@cs.uml.edu
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