More Glitches in the ATS Matrix

[ArMaP]

Regarding the legalities of 'scraping' content from ATS, my understanding of the law is that the only person or entity who would have any legal claim would be the "owner' of that content, and the only claim they could have would be the "use" of the content interfered with, or infringed upon, their ability to generate revenue from said content.  Because DI is not a profit motivated site, and ATS is also not monetized (i.e. members do not have to pay to be members), it doesn't seem like there would be any valid legal claim.

That's true, but the "owner" of the content is not just the member that made the post, as ATS members "relinquish all exclusive copyrights to any materials" they post and "grant TAN non-exclusive, non-revocable worldwide, royalty-free rights to copy, distribute, display, reproduce, modify, adapt, create derivative works, and publicly perform the materials in perpetuity in all forms", so TAN (The Above Network, an entity that I don't know is still in existence) is considered a kind of co-owner.

I think the larger question would be 'how' this content is intended to be used.

That's covered by the Creative Commons License used by ATS: no commercial use, no derivatives.

I've actually spent a good deal of time contemplating exactly this question, specifically as it relates to ATS data in particular.  There are several possibilities, but the most likely one (in my mind) is to have the content serve as a reference background.  In other words, to have the content available to members such that it could be searched and answers could be found to questions members might have without the need to replicate the original discussion all over again.  This makes sense.  In this regard, any potential claim of infringement becomes even more remote (almost to the point of non-existence) by virtue of the fact that no one would be "re-posting" this same content again; it would only be searched, read, and then closed again.  Therefore, there would be no visual evidence the content even existed...short of being able to search an individual's browser search history (which if it ever comes to that, is a much larger issue).

If it's available on the Internet its possible to make copies.

I don't think it's an issue.  To me, the bigger issue is simply the capture of this data in a coherent fashion.  'Scraping' by its very nature is an imprecise method of data replication, and it winds up capturing all sorts of other extraneous stuff along with it (i.e. things like headers and footers and all sorts of other clutter).  As a result, the 'delimiters' of any such data become difficult at best, so further parsing of the data requires considerable clean up before it can be archived in a coherent way.  This becomes especially true if the intent is to store the data in a retrievable fashion for persons other than the person who performed the capture effort.

I did it by making a program that reads all thread titles on a forum list then reads all pages of those threads. When reading the individual pages it extracts the individual posts' HTML and saves it on a database, with thread ID, post ID, member name and post date. That way it's easy to search for any post and to recreate it if needed.

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LOL!  Who's circling back over the original discussion now??  LOL!  I didn't go point by point in my reply to you here, ArMaP, principally because it would be pedantic and pointless.

I always split my answers in shorter pieces because it's easier for me than to get all the text in my head, translate it to Portuguese, think of the answer to all and translate it back to English.

Can we just change the subject and talk about...soccer, and/or which religion is best now??? 

That would be better than politics.