I got this Cease and Desist for scraping someone's site
dl.dropboxusercontent.com
dl.dropboxusercontent.com
It's a trap!
Don't do anything without an attorney. The Monday deadline is to ensure you don't stop and think of that option.
Do not respond.
Call an attorney. Let the attorney write the response, if any. Don't send a potential adversary evidence they don't have and don't try to figure this out yourself without professional legal advice.
Consider the legal fees insurance against an irrational amount of future awfulness.
Ask them if they have a LOT of paper first.
Therefore, there is no need to send a drive, even a small child could understand that. A lawyer-type asking for 'the drive' does not get around this detail of how 's and 0's can be easily copied. Point out there is no need for the show.
Finally, go nucular on them. Say you are going to post your scraper tool onto github with full instructions on how to scrape their site unless $3,141,592.65 is donated by them to the EFF by teatime on Tuesday.
> SSD drive that is soldered to the motherboard of your MacBook Air/High-End Notebook/Chromebook
I assume the confusion started because the RAM is soldered.
[1] You can see internal pictures at chromium.org, e.g. http://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/developer-information-fo...
But then they also want you to 'delete any data in your possession', so they already know that that is bullshit.
It's clear that they intend for it to be an otherwise clean drive, since the mention they're going to wipe the drive before returning it.
Again, they're not asking for any specific drive, just that you turn over a copy of all the data collected on a medium that's easy for them to use.
See also: formatted with DragonFlyBSD's "Hammer" filesystem. Archived in BinHex. Saved with Base37 encoding. And 9-bit bytes. In the "/home/leopard/music" directory of a fresh Debian Potato install.
This sounds like "We don't quite have enough evidence that you did it, please admit to it fully so we have enough to throw the book at you".
Also, the demander would have to prove it was a Bot or something, and that actual data was downloaded. It could be just a guy with a lot of free time to browse every page on the site.
in any regard -- this demand is ludicrous.
> @redheadjessica it's a business with a physical location that I sometimes frequent - they'd ban me from it.
[edit: I wonder if the pages scraped a publicly accessible. Maybe they are only accessible on LAN while at said location? This might put an interesting twist on things (as everyone here is just assuming a site accessible on the public Internet.]
But do stop scraping the site and stay clear of any involvement with it in the future.
There is nothing (law, morals, or else) that prevents one from scraping a publicly accessible website.
Can you point to any legal precedent that supports your contention (honest question)?
(and I'm pretty sure there is none).
But in all seriousness, enjoy your new toilet paper because that's all that letter is good for!
Even if you were going to comply, how can you be sure they wouldn't steal YOUR data?
From the letter, it's clear that they don't expect anything else to be there, since they comment that they're going to wipe the drive when they're done looking at it, before returning the drive.
The drive is just meant as a convenient way to transfer a large amount of data.