Re: Is phpGrabComics legal?
On Sat, 22 Jan 2005 01:30:33 +0000, Henning Makholm <henning@makholm.net> wrote:
> Scripsit Brian Ristuccia <brian@ristuccia.com>
> > On Fri, Jan 21, 2005 at 11:28:35PM +0000, Andres Baravalle wrote:
>
> First off, irrespective of legality and morality, does Debian need
> another comic downloader in the first place? There is already
> dailystrips and stripclub in the archive.
phpGrabComics is fairly good (-;
> >> "All comics are copyright of respective owners, and redistribution of
> >> the comics is, for most comics and in most circumstances, not
> >> permitted. phpGrabComics is intended for personal use only."
>
> > Restricting phpGrabComics to personal use only will prevent its inclusion in
> > Debian. Otherwise, I see no reason why the project would not include it.
>
> I think Andres is trying to CHA with respects to law that make it a
> criminal offence and/or contributory infringement to distribute a tool
> that is meant for unlawful copying of the comics. The assertion that he
> *indends* it to be used for things that are probably fair use might
> get him off that hook.
I asked for advice because I wanted an opinion from someone else on
the legality of the software.
The software was born for downloading the comics for my personal use,
and then I made it available to the public.
The server is not distributing copies of the comics and/or inserting
the comics in the web pages. Is only publishing a XML with the
location of the comics. Very much like google does. The clients
parses the XML and is the user of the client, from my point of view,
that needs to remember that he cannot distribute the material unless
falls under fair use.
But, of course, I might be wrong and I'd like to be sure that it is
not illegal.
If that is the case, I can just do what I did before, that is
developping phpGrabComics only for me.
> In the same way, it is without doubt possible to dig up some webcomic
> artists who are willing to allow this kind of downloading, especially
> not-very-succesful ones who consider any reader a good reader. This
> ought to demonstrate adequately that the software does have legitimate
> uses.
yes, in fact I have been asked by an author to include its comic, and
another one wrote an entry on his blog, happy for the inclusion.
> On the other hand, it is well known that many more succesful comic
> authors consider such automated downloading distasteful to say the
> least, especially if they rely on advertising revenue to cover their
> bandwidth expenses.
I am aware of that. The point of phpGrabComics is that you don't need
to remember day by day to go to the web site. Your phpGrabComics will
have saved a copy for you.
> In the interest of helping users not piss off people _inadvertently_
> it would probably be a really good idea to include in the
> documentation an explicit warning to only point the thing at strips
> whose author has explicitly agreed to it. (This should not be a
> license condition or it would make the thing non-free, but as an
> informative warning it is fair game).
I suppose that it would mean excluding *all* the syndicated comics
(dilbert, calvin and hobbes etc.). They cover 2/3 of the comics.
They will not give me an explicit permission, but I'd like to know if
I'm doing anything wrong from a legal point of view.
Andres
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