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Does Leopard Promote Content Theft?
I am just in the middle of watching Jobs’ Keynote at WWDC07 and was interested in the new ‘webclip’ technology.
From computerworld:
WebClip enables users to “scissor” a portion of a Web page and then turn it into a stand-alone Dashboard widget
This basically allows you to create a ‘widget’ on your desktop that contains a portion of someone’s website.
But doesn’t this bypass most web site terms and basically avoid you viewing adverts or the rest of the content, affectively ‘deep-linking’ into portions of the content?
I think its cool, but am somewhat unsure about its legality … what do you think?
This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 11th, 2007 at 4:32 pm and is filed under General.
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July 11th, 2007 at 9:52 pm
It seems unlikely to me that this would amount to a copyright violation. Since the use is personal and non-commercial, doesn’t negatively affect the market value of the work and is to be part of another “work” meaning with other widgets, there likely isn’t much of a copyright violation to be found.
However, it may be considered trespass of chattles as well as, potentially, a violation of the computer fraud and abuse act. Since, based upon what you described, this is a very simplified version of screen scraping, users of the widget would need to be careful how they used the tool
Of course, the likelihood of anyone encountering legal trouble from using this are slim to none. Similar services have been around for years that email updates to people or convert HTML into RSS. Those services have seemingly avoided trouble. It is only when that content is redistributed broadly that people get truly upset.
All in all, it is a neat feature and I don’t foresee much trouble from what I’ve read here. Still, I will have to look into it more, both as a copyright follower and as a Mac user.
As always, I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice.