[R-pkg-devel] Pkgs with ToS violations

On 04 Aug 2016, at 05:21 , Dirk Eddelbuettel <edd at debian.org> wrote:

On 3 August 2016 at 22:26, Bob Rudis wrote:
| I came across https://cran.rstudio.com/web/packages/boxoffice/index.html
| in CRAN today and while I don't expect CRAN to be a legal authority,
| should there not be some kind of policy for excluding R packages that
| deliberately violate (data) site ToS? (I'm asking this here vs sending
| a note to CRAN folks since I tend to be a bit sensitive to this
| particular issue).
|
| Box Office Mojo - which is really just Amazon - clearly states that
| the activities this package facilitates are in violation of their ToS.
| Unlike examples on blogs that also violate BOM ToS, this pkg in CRAN
| is almost legitimizing the violations.
|
| Amazon only goes after a few folks a year and it's unlikely R folks
| will be their target (for now) but that doesn't make it OK IMO.
|
| Is this worth bringing up to CRAN?

I think so.

By all means bring it up. But there's the usual tools-vs-action discussion, and I do notice that the ToS has

? Licensing IMDb's Content; Consent to Use Robots and Crawlers: If you are interested in receiving our express written permission to use our content for your non-personal (including commercial) use, please contact our Licensing Department. We do allow the limited use of robots and crawlers, such as those from certain search engines, with our express written consent.

I.e., it could be a matter of suitable flagging of the software as requiring permission. You likely don't wnat CRAN to run automated tests that run scrapers, though.

-pd

Dirk

--
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com | @eddelbuettel | edd at debian.org