[Wolves] Please Don't......

[Adam Sweet]

--- Alastair Battrick <al at aj8.org> wrote:

> Dave Morley wrote:
> > This is just a general reminder to please not post
> links to content that
> > is not free to view. It can come back to haunt us
> through the lovely
> > archiving system.  If content is a tutorial on a
> free website that is
> > fine.  But if content is not under a free to view
> licensing like CC or
> > GPL etc then Please Don't Do It.
> 
> Why?

There are 2 issues here.

The first is that this PDF contains a copyright notice
which states that the contents may not be reproduced
or transmitted by any means including electronic,
without the permission of the copyright owner and
publisher.

In short it's illegal. No Starch Press make many of
their books available for download as PDF, but not for
free. I doubt they'd take kindly to us passing them
around. It should also be noted that we all now have a
copy of this PDF on our PCs, unless you deleted it (be
sure your mail client hasn't cached it).

I'd hate to see them use some kind of DRM to protect
their PDFs. I wouldn't like to explain to No Starch
Press' lawyers how I got their copyrighted material
either.

The second, as Andy illustrated (being the sysadmin of
the box that this list runs on), is that posting
attachments means that the server has to deliver that
attachment to all of the list members, including
retries and bounces. Which, as he points out, created
a 650MB spike in bandwidth usage, which none of us
have paid for, but somebody has to. This is why
Suntish posted it twice. The load on the server caused
by the first one slowed the system down for every
mailing list on the box (which is pretty much every
LUG in the UK) and meant that it wasn't delivered
promptly for anyone.

In fairness, I'm pretty sure that Suntish had no idea
that he would cause a problem.

So, to summarise:

1) Don't post attachments to the list.
2) Don't post copyrighted material to the list.

Please :)

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