The "perp" in this case would gladly buy a large informal after-hours roundtable the first two rounds of microbrew to discuss the matter in depth at #ir12 I think I understand what Twitter is doing and their perfectly reasonable follow up email will be on the blog soon ;-) ~Stu -------- Original Message -------- Subject: Re: [Air-L] Twitter Data Sharing Update - Thou Shalt Not Share Collections of Tweets From: Alex Halavais <[1]alex@halavais.net> Date: Thu, May 05, 2011 2:39 pm To: [2]air-l@listserv.aoir.org This seems like an opportune time to ask whether there is ever a time when violating the Terms of Service is an ethical practice for researchers. (As a practical issue, clearly Twitter can block access to particular IP blocks that it finds violating its API ToS, or turn off the firehose if you are whitelisted.) The natural response to this for most people is that it is never ethically permissible to do so. While I recognize that (for example) this would expose you to personal sanctions from the company for violating those terms, and potentially expose your institution, I'm less concerned with the legal implications than I am with ethical restrictions this places on the researcher. I think there are cases where violation of a set of Terms is ethically permissible, a position I took up at an AoIR preconference workshop last year. This gives us a concrete example. It seems to me that the tweets themselves are not owned by Twitter, and so they are restricting your ability to access these materials programmatically, not to actually having or redistributing the content. If you "magically" were in possession of a collection of tweets, they would have little say in their redistribution (though the authors might, an issue that I think is separate). Specifically, Twitter prohibits "scraping" the service, but fails to define this. If I hire a war room to cut and paste tweets, does this violate the policy? It's simply not clear. It seems to me there is a kind of Turing-test for scrapers: Twitter would have no way to know (other than asking) whether I was scraping programmatically or had hired a room full of undergrads to cut and paste. I've gotten away from my original question. There's no question that the courts have thus far sided with ToS as generally being binding. But when is it (or is it ever) ethically either acceptable or necessary to violate a web site's Terms? Best, Alex -- // // This email is // [x] assumed public and may be blogged / forwarded. // [ ] assumed to be private, please ask before redistributing. // // Alexander C. Halavais, ciberflâneur // [3]http://alex.halavais.net // _______________________________________________ The [4]Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers [5]http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: [6]http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org Join the Association of Internet Researchers: [7]http://www.aoir.org/ References 1. mailto:alex@halavais.net 2. mailto:air-l@listserv.aoir.org 3. http://alex.halavais.net/ 4. mailto:Air-L@listserv.aoir.org 5. http://aoir.org/ 6. http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org 7. http://www.aoir.org/