Apple issues DMCA to iPhone 5S availability tracker

by martin_ • 13 years ago

37 35 13 years ago

Reasonable use of DMCA? Or another brick in the walled garden?

These questions aside I find use of DMCAs to be a bit egregious lately, with little protection being afforded while much has been done to raise the unworldly punishments wrought on copyright complaints increasing fines to the point where they mirror court settlements for financial firms.

dylz• 13 years ago

I feel this is 100% reasonable. They are abusively spidering Apples servers in addition to a trademark violation in the domain.

yuubi2• 13 years ago

Please cite the bit of the DMCA related to either of those?

gergles• 13 years ago

It's the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, not the Digital Millennium "be nice to our servers and protect our trademarks" act.

DMCA is not the correct tool for this.

axman6• 13 years ago

What did the website originally do?

selectodude• 13 years ago

It would tell you which stores near your zip code had iPhone 5Ss (that's awkward to type), and which size, carrier and color they were.

hiitssteve• 13 years ago

Sent you an email when the apple store you indicated showed availability for the iPhone 5s

37prime2• 13 years ago

Here’s from the Takedown notice:

[4] Reason:

Content Type / Violation: Automated scraping/copying/acquiring web app, operating in violation of the apple.com Internet Service Terms of Use

Maarten88• 13 years ago

They could also sue Google for this violation.

cmelbye• 13 years ago

Sure, but why? I'm sure they love the search traffic that Google gives them. I'm not so sure they love someone scraping an internal in-store pick up API to analyze their inventory and cause incidents of "What do you mean you don't have the 64 GB Gold iPhone 5S for Verizon!? This website says you have it in stock!"

37prime2• 13 years ago

Apparently you're trying to cut down a tree in the forest with a red herring.

Google doesn't do what apple-tracker.com was doing.

rsynnott3• 13 years ago

Google obeys robots.txt: http://store.apple.com/robots.txt

Clearly, this service doesn't.

sycren• 13 years ago

If it was crowd sourcing the information, would there still be a problem?

This is probably more about their supply chain management around the country than how they are getting the information.

comex• 13 years ago

Note that this is not a DMCA notice, as it does not have to do with copyright; however, despite following a DMCA notice template, it doesn't actually claim to be, except for this nonsensical sentence:

"I have a good faith belief that the removal of copyright management information from the material listed above is not authorized by law."

jwise0• 13 years ago

Importantly, facts are not copyrightable (/Feist v. Rural/ was the Supreme Court decision that cemented this into the case law), so not only is this not a DMCA notice, the DMCA -- as best I understand -- couldn't possibly apply here.

Now, a cease and desist from scraping would be completely within their rights to do -- as far as I understand, nobody's come to any consensus as to whether terms of use are legally enforceable, but given the way aaronsw's case was going, I'm not convinced that a court would back this use of Apple's site.

PilateDeGuerre• 13 years ago

Hey Mordy you're sure to stop by and read this at some point so this appeal is to you:

Please put your code up on GitHub. sed -i 's/Apple/aFruit/g' if you'd feel better about it that way, but fuck Apple and allow people to run their own Heroku app if they'd like.

milkshakes• 13 years ago

for what it's worth, this appears to be an invalid claim under the DMCA, and filing a counter-claim is actually relatively straightforward: http://www.dmlp.org/legal-guide/responding-dmca-takedown-not...

accountoftheday• 13 years ago

No claim is made under the DMCA, it is merely made to look similarly scary.

kika• 13 years ago

We need a list, somewhere on wiki, to collect all these notices and store them forever. Then one day when I'm working on a next venture round and the law firm comes knocking, trying to "help" me for the sizable chunk of this funding, I'll quickly run their name. And will tell them "guys, I'm trying to innovate, you're trying to kill innovation. You're not friends, you're foes. Go away, #$%$%#$%^$^" :-)

I'm sure Apple's money are not my measly $50K, but there're not enough Apples for all the law firms out there...

magicalist• 13 years ago

There is one. The Chilling Effects database has collected them for some time, though the contents aren't collected automatically, they're submitted voluntarily. The database contains mostly DMCA takedown notices, but also several other types of cease and desist orders.

https://www.chillingeffects.org/notice.cgi

You can search by field[1], including sender, though note that many won't contain a law firm as the sender since many companies farm out their DMCA complaints to companies that do nothing but file mass automated complaints (which gets you things like Microsoft demanding that Google remove links to pages on microsoft.com[2]).

[1] http://chillingeffects.org/search.cgi

[2] http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/09/microsofts-copyri...

Tarang• 13 years ago

Why is apple going all evil all of a sudden. I would have thought they would like people to know where to buy their stuff.

jhack• 13 years ago

All of a sudden?

Iftheshoefits• 13 years ago

1) It's hardly sudden. 2) People who buy Apple products aren't buying technology as much as they are buying into a culture that features technology as a badge of identification; they'll "know where to buy [Apple] stuff" whether or not this site exists.

matthewmacleod• 13 years ago

2000 called; it wants it's clichè back.

zamalek• 13 years ago

They have been evil ever since they removed USB mass storage support from iPods. They have just been hiding it all behind a fashion facade.

angelomichel_nl• 13 years ago

What's all the fuzz about?

I am happy that those kind of sites are taken down. Full of ads. They ruin the interwebs. Or am I missing anything?

coob• 13 years ago

What I don't understand about all this is that Apple used to have availability trackers of their own!

rsynnott3• 13 years ago

As the site's robots.txt tells crawlers not to do this, doesn't seem hugely unreasonable: http://store.apple.com/robots.txt

joezydeco• 13 years ago

A few years ago I set up a twitter account, @MacRefurb. It's a kludge that linked refurb-tracker.com's scraper to twitter via some RSS-to-tweet service that I can't even remember where to login now.

It's been running for over 4 years now and nary a DMCA peep. I guess it's just off Apple's radar.

Apple issues DMCA to iPhone 5S availability tracker

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