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There's a lot of local history locked up in facebook's nostalgia groups. I want to archive it in an open format.

I want to grab new rental listings and put them in an RSS feed, so I only look at each one once.

That's my uses for data scraping right now. If that destroys someone's business, I don't actually care. Maybe it's selfish, but my right to re-format data for my own convenience outweighs their right to make a profit.




Not that I think you shouldn't do it or you're doing something wrong, but describing it as a right irks me the wrong way. You don't have any right to expect someone else's computers to work for you.


I'm not sure how to phrase it except in terms of competing rights, but I take your point.

At the point where I'm scraping, the data's on my computer though.


You could call them interests .

It's often in a business's interest to format data in a specific way to make money, for example interlacing it with ads.


Nice.


If that destroys someone's business, I don't actually care. Maybe it's selfish, but my right to re-format data for my own convenience outweighs their right to make a profit.

Exhibit A


Yeah, it's as unsympathetic framing of my position as I can offer.

But it's basically the same question as adblockers: Can I do what I want with the 1's and 0's on my own machine?

I'm not going to accept that I owe anyone a business model.


I'm not going to disagree with your use case here.

But I'm going to assume that you have some level of a conscious and you don't really mean you could give 3 shits about someone else's hard work so you can have some satisfaction at home. Because at face value that's exactly what you said.


No, I think that's fair. Unsympathetic framing, but not inaccurate. It's that whole "information wants to be free" thing.


BTW, kudos for presenting your point of view in a hostile forum and holding your own. I should have said that up front.




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