PHP Question :3

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VNAsian

I've been working with php for the last 2 weeks and really love it. I was wondering if this idea I have would be possible and even if it's legal. Could I create a web crawler with php that grabs the location of videoes from sites I specify and store the reference to that file in a database which then generates a bunch of iframes with the source of those videoes from the database. It seems very possible but I'm not really sure it's entirely legal. Is it? :I

NogDog

"Legal" may depend on where you live, and even then, intellectual property law is still kind of a mess. The best way to cover yourself is to request permission from the sites you want to crawl, and see what their policies are for use of their material on other sites. If the request is framed nicely and you explain how you'll link to their site and help drive traffic there, they may actually encourage it, if you're lucky. Most professional sites will have some sort of terms of use page that may tell you what you need to know, too.

root

Intellectual Property Rights is very simple to understand, if you didn't make it then its not yours, the person who created the media / property will have at the very basic level artistic copyright.

If you have a site that does not mention copyright, do not assume that it does not exist because it will.

As NogDog suggests, seek permission or an agreement like you would with reproduction of media from another source. Take Yahoo, they do not create much, if any, news but reprint / produce its content from other news sources / services and they will do so because they have a reprint agreement with those specific agencies.

The internet has never been a "Free for all" that it is perceived to be yet most people treat the digital frontier exactly as such, somewhere you can do as you please.

Tread carefully!

root

Addendum: A good example is Facebook. They have a user agreement with you that basically removes any rights to any material that you used to own. If you upload a family photo, it ceases to belong to you and all rights are transferred to Facebook to do with it as they please.

Facebook does this to protect itself from copyright claims and also to make money out of media that it has been given.