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Comment by apparent | Hacker News Reader

I think the key question is whether the automated actions resulted in information being retained by Pebble. If it was just going through a motion and pulling some data (or pulling all data but only keeping some of it), then that would be consistent with Eric's story and not be the kind of scraping that Rebble is worried about. They're worried about the content being archived somewhere else, and they seem to think that happened. But did it?

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One thing I'm confused about in this whole thing is what makes Rebble think they have a right to the data in the first place? They scraped it! "We don't like you scraping the data we scraped" doesn't hold water for me, whether Eric retained it or not.

Yeah, they definitely started by scraping. Apparently 500 of the 13,500 apps were submitted post-Pebble, and Rebble also apparently did a bunch of other upgrades over time.

But you're right that there's some hypocrisy here, given their roots, and they don't really acknowledge that.

I think the whole conversation shows how ridiculous it is to be worried so much about who's "scraping" what. The open web is designed to be public and permissive. If you don't want someone accessing "your" content, then don't serve it to the public. And if you do decide to serve to the public, don't complain when someone accesses that data in a way you don't like. The Internet would be so much better without all these people obsessed about how their bits were being accessed and about whether X counts as "scraping" or Y counts as "scraping." Good grief, people! Find something else to worry about.

Perhaps in general, but in this case it seems like they did have an agreement not to scrape, which overrides the general scrape-at-will ethos that you're describing.

Pebble threw it away, Rebble did not, and Core is a newcomer whith no right to anything.

Core is making new, compatible hardware, at scale, not as a hobby.

We can buy that hardware from Core, today.

That gives them quite a few rights.

What? Absurd. It gives them the right to nothing at all. They can make an app store themselves any time they want.

Well... I have a watchface on the old store. It is non functional because external APIs changed. I just recently decided to update it, and there is now a much improved version in my github account.

I asked Rebble weeks (!!) ago to give me back access to my own account and binaries on their store and to this day, I heard nothing from them. Nada.

If Core start a new store, I will immediately put the new, much improved version of my old watch face on their store. Rebble can keep the old, non-functional one in their archive if they want.

Do you mean that you uploaded it to Pebble back in the day before Rebble? Have you gone through these steps? https://help.rebble.io/recover-developer-account/?viewall=tr...

Yes. I did all that. Sent the email (many times). Got no reply. Ever.

It might not be the kind of scraping rebble is worried about, but a bunch of requests to extract data into another form is very plainly scraping and the contract doesn't differentiate based on intent or whether the process is entirely automated. The entire contract is similarly loose and informal, which contributes to these sorts of misunderstandings.

The most reasonable solution would have been for Eric to send an email first, but few contract disputes start with everyone doing the most reasonable thing.

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