Posted by
Russell McOrmond-2 on
Feb 05, 2007; 3:29pm
URL: http://civicaccess.416.s1.nabble.com/elections-canada-tp814p850.html
Daniel Haran wrote:
> Russell, did you get any reply for your 2005 letter?
>
http://www.digital-copyright.ca/node/1060 No. He's obviously not in the same position since the election, and
I haven't been re-sending all my letters to the new people as they get
the position. The Minister responsible for democratic reform has
changed a few times in the last year+.
> Oh, and you've been doing amazing work on this. Thanks.
On the radio (Montreal, but streaming online) in an hour to talk
about Vista, Net Neutrality, and copyright reform.
http://www.digital-copyright.ca/node/3678> Given the number of possible postal codes, it would take 14 days and 2
> hours to try each one if trying one per second. Gives us plenty of
> time before the next election, I should think :)
What I did in the past was just cache the data whenever a lookup was
done. That way I wouldn't be hammering the server (which could get you
into trouble), and the requests would be spread out over time. The
downside being that no 'new' data could come if they modify rules/etc to
shut me down.
Check out the 'ectools' subdirectory in the CVS for
http://sourceforge.net/projects/campaigntoolz/ . It uses XML-RPC to
separate a server that does the caching/scraping from a client which
would be part of the website. It's old now, but might be worth looking
at to start from.
I don't want to discourage you from doing this, but --- make sure you
are prepared for any legal complaints. Copyright is a funny thing in
that it matters what the source is. While it is true that the
information you are gathering are 'facts', that doesn't mean that there
isn't a copyright on the specific database of facts. The fact being not
under copyright means that they can't complain if you come up with the
information yourself (buy the Canada Post geographic data, do your own
matching to Elections Canada geographic data, etc), but they can
complain if you get it from them (directly or indirectly).
Politically it would be stupid for the government to sue you for this
because of the bad publicity -- but I doubt you would get any lawyer to
give that type of advise.
The side of me that spends time with lawyers wants to warn you, but
my political activist side wants to strongly encourage you!
BTW: I don't republish what I am using not because I'm worried about
being sued, but because it wouldn't be me that would be sued if I did
given it is my customer and not me that is the one who purchased the
data. If I was the one that purchased it, I'd make it available to
others via an XMLRPC call.
Where I have defied what I'm told the law is comes from republishing
the results of ATIP requests
http://www.flora.ca/A-2004-00246/ . I'm
told the law isn't clear about whether I'm allowed to do this, and most
likely I'm infringing crown copyright. To be honest, I think it would
be a sad state if the Government of Canada sued private citizens for
infringing crown copyright on ATIP requests.
--
Russell McOrmond, Internet Consultant: <
http://www.flora.ca/>
Please help us tell the Canadian Parliament to protect our property
rights as owners of Information Technology. Sign the petition!
http://www.digital-copyright.ca/petition/ict/ "The government, lobbied by legacy copyright holders and hardware
manufacturers, can pry my camcorder, computer, home theatre, or
portable media player from my cold dead hands!"