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The term of use is not the same as the license for the content. As is stated in the summery of the linked page, permission is granted under conditions such as "No Harm – You do not harm our technology infrastructure" and "You adhere to the below Terms of Use and to the applicable community policies when you visit our sites". Those conditions are not part of the license, which is a important distinction.

So all they need to do if they wanted a legal tool to prevent google is to create a community policy which dictate how scraping may be done for the purpose of youtube. No 30 day comment period.

Further down on that page, section 10. Management of Websites: *"The Wikimedia community and its members may also take action when so allowed by the community or Foundation policies applicable to the specific Project edition"

And finally in section 12. Termination: "We reserve the right to suspend or end the services at any time, with or without cause, and with or without notice."

In summary, they reserve the right to block access in response to abuse.



But copying and reproducing snippets from wikipedia doesn't do any harm to their technology infrastructure. It would be a negligible amount of hits to their system to grab and update the cached snippets.

And you are correct that the terms of service and license are different (even if there is a bit of overlap) but it's the license that matters when you are "copying" the content and reproducing it on your own, and the license is either CC BY-SA or GFDL both of which have no ability to prevent any one specific person from using the information.

>In summary, they reserve the right to block access in response to abuse.

This isn't abuse, its use. If copying the data from wikipedia and serving it up with attribution is abuse, then they need to update their terms of service and licenses to explicitly say so (which would pretty much end wikipedia). If Google is harming their infrastructure by causing excessive load doing the scraping, wikipedia has every right to block them. But Google is not (as far as we know), and therefore wikipedia does not have any moral right to block access, and Google has no moral or legal obligation to stop scraping and reproducing the content on their own servers. And if wikipedia does block Google from the service, Google has every right (legally and morally in my opinion) to find an alternate way of getting the data and reproducing it that doesn't access wikipedia's servers directly.




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