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Comment by meepmorp | Hacker News Reader

This post is confusing both because I do not speak French and because the caffeine hasn't kicked in yet, so I read that as LeBron Coin. Which doesn't seem all that bad for a gimmicky crypto currency, honestly.

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So there's this website that's the 7th in france according to Alexa (http://www.alexa.com/topsites/countries/FR) It's the craigslist of france. They don't have email alerts so I built a web app that does just that.

Then they noticed the traffic from my server (I guess) and blocked my IP from scraping their site, making the app basically useless, so I just forgot about it.

Now they are telling that I'm using their trademark in a way that can make users confuse my service with theirs, that according to their TOS I can't event link to their website without authorization (am I even bound by their TOS if I don't use their website?) and so on and so forth.

It was just a side project for me, so I don't mind dropping it.

The source code is on Github though if anyone is interested (https://github.com/jfoucher/lebonmail)

Use proxies.

That's a bad idea - doing that shows intent to circumvent an intended block.

See the last notable case "Craigslist v. 3Taps": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act#No...

I'm not sure if this is applicable to French/European law.

Nevertheless: If somebody doesn't want you to scrape, don't do it.

For those who don't read French and don't wish to investigate too much, "leboncoin" (le bon coin) roughly means "the good neighborhood/hangout" (and literally means "the good corner") in French.

For "the good corner" they don't play very nice do they?

Think of it as a corner in "The Wire". They are just defending their turf ;)

Here I was thinking it was yet another bitcoin clone.

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