Three Years of Hell to Become the Devil: Wonders of Interconnectivity

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Wonders of Interconnectivity

Fed up with how ghastly and unusable the UK National Railway site is, two intrepid individuals have gone ahead and remade the system in a way that is workable, quick, useful, and browser-compatible. No, they're not pretty, but they'll get you where you want to go quite quickly. Which I suppose goes against the ethos of British railway systems.

Sadly, they're almost certainly in conflict with the Terms and Conditions of the website itself. Someone with more knowledge of copyright law (and particularly English copyright law) would be required to judge this. [1] Pity if it is, though.

(Link via NTK.)

[1] It goes without saying that this isn't legal advice, as I'm neither qualified or allowed to give it. Really, I hope it's fair use.

Posted by Anthony on February 1, 2004 12:24 PM | Permalink

Comments

I'm impressed that your blog entries have FOOTNOTES. Wow. Very industrious.

Posted by: Liz | February 1, 2004 8:48 PM

I think it's fair game since they're using the copyrighted material to comment or critique. But I haven't finished a month in Copyright, let alone a full class's worth, and that'd only be US law, anyway.

Posted by: Paul Gutman | February 2, 2004 12:52 AM

Ah, good old Screen Scraping!! It's firmly in a gray area, and the outcome of any particular case would of course depend on jurisdictions involved (how do you stop someone in Sireria?), terms of service of the site, and what exactly was being done with the content 'scraped'. Also there is very likely to be a big difference legally depending on whether it the program doing the scraping was a client on the ultimate end users machine (probably allowed regardless of ToS) or a process on a server repackaging content (much less likely to slide by on this one). I've screen scrapped web sites before while doing spec work in marketing and web design: "Here's your current site with the new look" or "here's that new feature pasted up there". Ack, I blather on...but I see our Devil in Training here also reads NTK!! Wooot!!

Posted by: David Mercer | February 4, 2004 2:04 PM

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