[uf-discuss] FYI: Google Base is up and 100% microformat free

[Chris Messina]

On 11/16/05, Mark Pilgrim <pilgrim at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 11/16/05, Chris Messina <chris.messina at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Might it be possible to Greasemonkey their output into something
> > microformat-compliant?
> >
> > ...Granted that's annoying as heck (and might not even be practical),
> > but it would be pretty neat to be able to beat google at their own
> > game and distribute their results out elsewhere.
>
> >From http://base.google.com/base/tos.html :
>
> "Except as expressly authorized by Google or advertisers, you agree
> not to modify, rent, lease, loan, sell, distribute or create
> derivative works based on Google services or the Software, in whole or
> in part."

Yeah, derivitive works, I imagine, in the copyright sense... in which
case, you can do whatever you want for your personal use. You should
even be able to create and distribute a bunch of Greasemnkey scripts
that operate on the output code since you're not distributing the
results of the GM script's output...

"It prevents others from misappropriating the original work of a
creator and redistributing it with "trival" changes without
permission."

I mean, if you couldn't create GM scripts for Base because of that
clause, it would be like saying you can't sell mirrors that reflect
newspapers because you're trivially modifying copyrighted work... yet
in fact, the mirror has substantial non-infringing uses outside the
infringing application... But hey, I'm no lawyer.

Anyway -- it sucks that they're not doing MFs. But that just means
that the rest of us have a chance to keep our data out of google's
clutches a build a distributed "base" w/ MFs.

Chris