Crazy "agreement" on calorie-counting site
Link (Thanks, Felix!)CalorieLab, Inc., grants you a license to use the CalorieLab nutrition databases as follows:
You may:
* Access CalorieLab's Calorie Counter and Nutrition Facts database pages manually, selecting links manually, via a Web browser on a personal computer
* For personal, noncommercial use only
* Accessing a maximum of 20 pages per day and a maximum of 200 pages per month
Note to CalorieLab employees and officers: READ CAREFULLY. By reading this blog-post, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.
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Good thing that going to their main page and taping down the F5 key is OK, or I'd be in trouble. Fortunately that's just visiting the one page over and over.
Their User Agreement page is now blank.
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Rotten Tomatoes has a similar agreement at the bottom of every page. I seriously question the enforceability of these things.
It sounds to me like that agreement is intended to curtail screen-scraping software.
My wife is into genealogy (she recently traced one branch of her father's family back to the year 6 AD!) and one of the most prominent sites offering genealogical data is familysearch.com. Each page of family data might contain twenty or so people, and has a link to download the data on those twenty or so people in a format common to desktop genealogy programs. Problem is, in getting back to 6 AD, and exploring the myriad other family branches, she was going to have to download literally tens of thousands of these little files.
Well I opened me up a text editor and wrote a little program--about 40 lines--that does a width-first recursive walk across these pages, downloading that data and accumulating it into one big import file. She can now pull down a couple thousand of these files all in one whack.
Thing is, it's pretty hard on their server. I'm making several hundred requests for pages every second this thing runs. I was a little surprised they didn't have some automated something in place to throttle my connections or cut me off. But they don't. It's entirely possible their traffic is big enough that my hammering is a drop in the bucket, but for a smaller site, several users doing this could crush them.
A site with lots of, say, nutritional data would be easy pray to a screen-scraping program. And it's not just the potential DoS attack that they'd be concerned about. I could very easily open a competing site with data I culled from their pages. And if it's proprietary data that they're licensing, they could be liable if I did that. So, I don't think this license actually solves anything, but I think that's what they were concerned about when they wrote it.
Re enforceability--it would be simple for me to write an Apache module in mod_perl or even a simple PHP script that limits a particular remote host to a certain number of pages per day or month. Piece of cake.
Ratbastid, I think you're confusing "technical enforceability" (e.g., could you throttle a server? yes!) with legal enforceability ("Do I form an agreement to limit my use of your web-page just by looking at your web-page?")
USDA has a lot of nutritional info here for free: http://www.ars.usda.gov/Services/docs.htm?docid=8964
I wonder if CalorieLabs incorporation of the Fast Food nutritional info is covered by any restrictions imposed by the restaurant.
-- Dave
Their Agreement page now forwards to "Calories Burned During Sex."
Somewhere there has a sense of humor :)