Well, the university uses a crappy PeopleSoft webapp thing for searching for co-op jobs. It's slow, ugly, and it goes offline every night at midnight. It's terrible.
I got fed up with trying to use it, so I looked at the HTML and decided that it was easy enough to parse. I made the deliberate decision to link to the original job descriptions so that you'd still have to log in to find any real information about the jobs. However, a listing of {employer,job title,location} seemed harmless enough.
I wrote it such that it ran once and spat out a static HTML file so that it wouldn't be constantly accessing the original server. Then I hosted it on my university account and told people about it via Twitter. I had no intention of hiding it; I wanted it to help people! Also, I posted the scraping script (which required a university account to login before it could run) on GitHub for others to use or improve. Y'know.
A few days later, my account had been disabled! When I went to see the people in charge, they told me that I was violating their copyright and since I has posted my code to scrape, they considered me to be a malicious hacker. They also said that I could have single-handedly taken down the co-op program at the university.
For my formal response, I learned some obscure details about Canadian copyright law (like what I posted in the grandparent), and took the opportunity to educate the administrators on hacker culture (with the help of Eric Raymond). I also made sure to explain the implications of my script (runs only once, requires a login, links to the actual copyrighted works). Oh, and I used some of my connections with IT security and professors as character reference.
In the end, they decided to punish me for reproducing their data (which the login screen technically prohibits, but it's unrealistic- having the page in memory is a reproduction!) by making me take a business ethics course, which was actually a fun and interesting course. No criminal charges, no expulsion/suspension. I figured it wasn't too bad, though I would have appreciated an apology for essentially calling me a terrorist. ;)
What would have happened if you declined to take the course? Do you think you "learned your lesson", or would you do something like this again if you had the chance?
They added the course as one of my graduation requirements, so I guess I wouldn't have graduated.
The lesson I learned is to not try to make others' lives easier. :P I definitely won't shy away from scraping whatever data sources I can get my hands on, but I probably won't share the results with large groups of people.
