There is a difference between data portability and, potentially, a denial of service due to a large-scale import. Twitpic probably cares about all its users and given that it does not control Posterous' scraper, it can only block it.
Also, let's not forget Twitpic's terms of service:
Data mining, "scraping", and/or unauthorized crawling of Twitpic by any means is prohibited unless explicit permission is given...
I bring these up because I'm sure when it's convenient for them, Posterous would point to their ToS to block something.
Had Posterous worked with Twitpic and got denied instead of doing an arrogant marketing campaign ("rescue"?), I would be 100% behind Posterous. Right now, it's Posterous posturing for the upper hand when they don't really have a case.
Hypothetically, if I have something web accessible, and you are accessing it, it becomes unauthorized as soon as I (the owner of the service) tell you that you are no longer authorized to use my service.
Analogies rarely work -but it's sort of like how it's trespassing once I tell you to never come on my property again.
I also have a publicly accessible email address and phone number for my work. Should it be OK for someone to keep calling me incessantly and lock my phone line such that no one else can come through?
Of course not, and that's why there are tools to protect against phone and email spam, and that's why it's good to be polite and not abuse a service. Especially a free service.
You're supporting making it hard for people to export their data just because you don't like Posterous' tone?
If the load is causing problems for TwitPic, they should tell Posterous to increase the delay between requests when they're importing data. I doubt this is the case.
No I didn't say that: I support sensible ways of data export. I run websites myself and I know how a badly written scraper can affect performance. And as a user, I want full control of my data.
So the solution is to have both parties figure out how to transfer the data large amounts of data without affecting overall performance. It's a matter of being polite on both sides, and Posterous started the rudeness with this lame campaign, thus losing their moral high ground IMHO. Bringing in the lawyers is a bit blunt, but IMHO it's 100% Twitpic's right.
Service like Twitpic can actually protect themselves from this kind of problem by having APIs for data export, with the APIs having clear rate limiting and other specs any importer needs to adhere to. Then the lawyers are not needed and if the spec is breached, no one can complain if Twitpic blocks them.
The chances of Twitpic's performance being harmed by this are slim to none. I don't care about Twitpic being rude to Posterous, but Twitpic is being rude to its users.
Good point. Reminds me of Mary Poppins where Michael tries to get his money back from the old banker and the resulting kerfuffle causes a bank run. I guess that is part of Posterous strategy to cause a bit of havoc and generate publicity and an exodus as a result.
TwitPic should be embarrassed, this is just anticompetitive BS.