Haha, it's just using the RSS feed... trade secrets my ass.
TwitPic should be embarrassed, this is just anticompetitive BS.
TwitPic should be embarrassed, this is just anticompetitive BS.
Also, let's not forget Twitpic's terms of service:
Data mining, "scraping", and/or unauthorized crawling of Twitpic by any means is prohibited unless explicit permission is given...
I bring these up because I'm sure when it's convenient for them, Posterous would point to their ToS to block something.
Had Posterous worked with Twitpic and got denied instead of doing an arrogant marketing campaign ("rescue"?), I would be 100% behind Posterous. Right now, it's Posterous posturing for the upper hand when they don't really have a case.
Twitpic have a publicly accessible http server. Sending it http requests is therefore something they've implicitly allowed.
Of course not, and that's why there are tools to protect against phone and email spam, and that's why it's good to be polite and not abuse a service. Especially a free service.
Analogies rarely work -but it's sort of like how it's trespassing once I tell you to never come on my property again.
If the load is causing problems for TwitPic, they should tell Posterous to increase the delay between requests when they're importing data. I doubt this is the case.
So the solution is to have both parties figure out how to transfer the data large amounts of data without affecting overall performance. It's a matter of being polite on both sides, and Posterous started the rudeness with this lame campaign, thus losing their moral high ground IMHO. Bringing in the lawyers is a bit blunt, but IMHO it's 100% Twitpic's right.
Service like Twitpic can actually protect themselves from this kind of problem by having APIs for data export, with the APIs having clear rate limiting and other specs any importer needs to adhere to. Then the lawyers are not needed and if the spec is breached, no one can complain if Twitpic blocks them.
This episode can backfire on TwitPic a lot if users decide to leave it, and even more if Posterous decides to open source its TwitPic liberation tool to http://dataportability.org/. These were brought up by same guys from Google's data liberation front (http://www.dataliberation.org/), which is actually endorsed by google: http://twitter.com/google/statuses/17271511025