It looks like they only scraped about 6000 journals from DW, and about 6000 from LJ - which, proportionately, is not many. (I'm betting I got snagged because I'm on the access lists of several hub people, including D.)
And I agree, it's totally sleazy and lousy. I'm just not sure what the legal implications are.
I think, roughly: - Copyright is actionable for user icons people have created from unique materials. (F'ex, either I or my ex-husband would hold the copyright for my default harp icon: it's a photo manip of a photo I took, he fiddled with using his software, and I did the cleanup work for.)
- The rest of it, I don't even know. It's not exactly identity theft, because they're not actually pretending to be the profiles they've scraped. But it's dishonest, and it's sleazy, and it's a lousy business practice besides.
The Department of Justice website about identity theft implies that it might be legally actionable if someone wanted to bring a case *if* there's also an attempt to commit a crime. Besides, y'know, delighting me in starting with a Shakespeare quote.
And here's a thing: when they scraped, they included posts (stripping cut tags and other site-specific warning codes) with NSFW/not-appropriate-for-minors material. And that might, in fact, be enough.
But it's an area I know much less about than the copyright piece.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2012-08-16 05:13 pm (UTC)And I agree, it's totally sleazy and lousy. I'm just not sure what the legal implications are.
I think, roughly:
- Copyright is actionable for user icons people have created from unique materials. (F'ex, either I or my ex-husband would hold the copyright for my default harp icon: it's a photo manip of a photo I took, he fiddled with using his software, and I did the cleanup work for.)
- The rest of it, I don't even know. It's not exactly identity theft, because they're not actually pretending to be the profiles they've scraped. But it's dishonest, and it's sleazy, and it's a lousy business practice besides.
The Department of Justice website about identity theft implies that it might be legally actionable if someone wanted to bring a case *if* there's also an attempt to commit a crime. Besides, y'know, delighting me in starting with a Shakespeare quote.
And here's a thing: when they scraped, they included posts (stripping cut tags and other site-specific warning codes) with NSFW/not-appropriate-for-minors material. And that might, in fact, be enough.
But it's an area I know much less about than the copyright piece.