Ma.gnolia

Saves copies of your page!

[Hester]

Is this legal? On the tutorial page on Ma.gnolia.com it says:

Saved Copies of Web Pages
When you add a bookmark to Ma.gnolia, we rush around in the background to save a copy of that web page for your future viewing. Never again will you be lost if a web page moves or gets deleted. Ma.gnolia's saved copies have got you covered, so that what you find stays found.

I know there was some debate about the Google cache a while back. Did that ever get resolved?

I just wondered if Ma.gnolia were legally allowed to copy web page content to their server. I wonder if it includes all the JavaScript and CSS too.

[MatthewHSE]

Surely they've heard of the problems with Google's cache, and I'd think they would have sought legal advice before creating a feature like that. But I don't like it; do they say what their UA or IP is so we webmasters can block that kind of scraping?

Not that I'm a great one to talk, since I use ScrapBook for Firefox all the time. I've been burned by link rot too often I guess, which is probably where things like this come from in the first place...

[Pfui]

Upon digging for and then back-tracing Ma.gnolia.com-related info in my access logs:

They don't ask for robots.txt.

They don't ID themselves via UA or IP.

Also, their TOS says "[Y]ou may not copy, modify, publish, transmit, distribute, perform, display or sell any of [their] proprietary information" -- yet they apparently do most of those very things to others' proprietary, copyrighted information.

Definitely ban-worthy, if you ask me.