Hard News: Grade-A lunacy. With your money.
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Makes me wonder why Public Address doesn't have a policy that requires users to obtain written permission (within 1 to 5 working days) before commenting on the System?
Please submit comments in typing, double-spaced on single sided A4 paper. Attach to a bottle of single malt whiskey (min 750ml), and post to R Brown Esq, Private Bag, Point Chevalier. Enclose a stamped, self addressed envelope if you require acknowledgement or a reply.
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Until at least late 2007, Te Papa had a proscription on linking to their web pages without permission. (They've since dropped that, and now have quite reasonable T&C.) But seriously: Te Papa? Our Place? I guess it was a sign that someone didn't have a clue.
When I enquired in 2007, Te Papa replied, “We are not aware of any legal obstacles to this approach. It affords us some level of protection against inappropriate linking that could be damaging to our various interests.” A marvellous piece of nonsense.
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Grade-A lunacy. With your money.
You may regret having used this title now, should Banks' Supercity Olympics proposal get any traction in the real world...
But yes, seems like a spectacularly stupid set of rules to provide for a website. And this:
do not modify the information or make it available to third parties through a networked computer environment
Does this mean I can't actually tell other people what the URL is for the Auckland Council website?
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It affords us some level of protection against inappropriate linking that could be damaging to our various interests.
Says the museum that hosted a 9/11 conspiracy theorist.
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But seriously: Te Papa? Our Place? I guess it was a sign that someone didn't have a clue.
To be fair, they're probably trying to protect people from using copyrighted images. Artists and estates may provide permission for a museum or gallery to put images up on a web site on the condition that it only appears on that web site.
Obviously that's damn hard to make happen in the real world, but stringent terms and conditions may have been part of their attempt.
Not everyone has the ability to work in ideal conditions around the internet.
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Interesting; I can't find the offending paragraph on the Manukau Libraries site anymore - have they nixed it since the blog post?
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Grade-A lunacy. With your money.
You may regret having used this title now, should Banks' Supercity Olympics proposal get any traction in the real world...
Nah. That would be Gold Medal Lunacy.
You'd never make it as a subbie, being so blind to obvious puns =)
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Ben, can you check the amended post and see if I've missed anything about the Auckland Council T&Cs?
Looks good. I think they're trying to cover scraping and re-using with the "do not [...] make it available to third parties through a networked computer environment". I presume that is designed to stop people writing an app over top of the library catalogs, bus timetables, etc..
In any case, it's a load of scallops. You could read that clause as not allowing any data to go through a router!
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Interesting; I can't find the offending paragraph on the Manukau Libraries site anymore - have they nixed it since the blog post?
They have!
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I presume that is designed to stop people writing an app over top of the library catalogs, bus timetables, etc..
Which is still counter-productive and wrong.
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Interesting; I can't find the offending paragraph on the Manukau Libraries site anymore - have they nixed it since the blog post?
Yep goneburger. I sent them an email this morning asking what I should do if a friend asks me on Twitter if Manukau library has a certain book.
Normally I'd give them a URL.
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I mean, if they really wanted to, could they set up a whitelist of authorised referrers and block everyone else? Why are they asking US to do their relevance-minimising?
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To be fair, they're probably trying to protect people from using copyrighted images. Artists and estates may provide permission for a museum or gallery to put images up on a web site on the condition that it only appears on that web site.
If you link to an image, it doesn't mean it appears on your website.
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How does that anecdote go about a certain prominent former MP asking a staffer to "print out" the internet for him so he could read it over the weekend? In the MP's defence, that was many years ago; it would be nice to think most people now had a grasp of what teh internets is, and how it works.
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Which is still counter-productive and wrong.
Oh absolutely. It's just one of the many scenarios that tend to get risk-averse corporate bunnies all lathered up.
"But but! What if a screen scraping iPhone app gives someone the wrong bus time and they miss their bus and they freeze to death and we get sued!?"
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To be fair, they're probably trying to protect people from using copyrighted images.
No, Te Papa already had a very clear and separate image copyright policy on the site (which incidentally claimed Te Papa owned copyright on scanned public domain images, something else I took them to task for, but that's another story). This was a blanket prohibition on linking to web pages in general.
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which incidentally claimed Te Papa owned copyright on scanned public domain image
Copyright in the images, or copyright in the reproductions that appear on their website? Because that's quite a vexed issue. I understand they are allowed to claim the latter.
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Christchurch City Council's only restriction:
If you wish to provide a link to our site from your website, you must do so in such a way that it is clear to users that the pages are part of the Christchurch City Council website. You must not represent any page on this website in a subframe.
I guess, given the level of council fuckedupedness in general down here, it's nice they appear to have got one thing right.
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the Dunedin City Council's web site handles all this quite cleanly, they explicitly allow linking:
Links to our pages must clearly reveal that they belong to our site. Representing our pages in subframes is prohibited.
The subframes thing is so that they don't get misrepresented which I think is fair.
My main issues with the DCC pages is the content (or lack there of)
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because that would create a problem that ,well I can't actually define the problem at the moment
You guys (and Emma of course) a making fun of this and it's damn serious. If websites are used the way they were intended the end result would be the wanton (thinking of you when I say this Emma) dissemination of knowledge.
Good grief, it's a slippery slope to having people building entire websites dedicated to spreading knowledge. If that sort of thing spread to local government or even worse national government people might discover what their representatives are doing!
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wait... people still use subframes?
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sadly yes
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Its been argued that photographic reproductions of public domain art, contain no creative merit. And is there for unable to be copyrighted.
I'm talking about a right in law, as per the opinion of a copyright lawyer friend regarding my scanning of public domain artworks from an out of print but still quite recent catalogue.
(I know, I'm making this thread about copyright - the Godwin law of PAS strikes again.)
I agree with you on the (lack of) actual merit of these claims.
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I think we had a debate on one of those previous copyright threads about whether copyright exists in a digital reproduction of an out of copyright work.
Without regurgutating too much of what was previously discussed, the law is unclear in this area, but it'd be a brave company or organisation that sued for copyright infringement on the strength of a digital reproduction where the original was out of copyright.
As for the link thing, I can't see how an organisation could ever enforce a condition like that. It might be possible, if all elements of a contract between the parties concerned could be established (consideration? offer and acceptance? etc etc). And I imagine the organisation would have a challenge establishing any kind of loss when all the person is doing is linking to publicly available material.
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The material in question is not publicly available - it almost exclusively belongs to private collections and museums. It just so happens that copyright on it has expired.
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