> The web is open for everyone, and thus following your argument the rights (legal or moral) should not apply.
I didn't say that, and I disagree with that. The web isn't "default open", and Google has a license that you agree to when using their product that says what you can and cannot do with it. And scraping their site is against that "license" (aka the "terms of service") giving them both the legal and the moral right to stop you while keeping it "publicly" accessible.
Wikipedia's terms of service specifically state that anyone is free to read, print, share, and reuse their articles and other media under free and open licenses. They have no more right (moral or legal) to take issue with youtube including wikipedia snippets in their application than Linus Torvalds has the right to take issue with Google using Linux in their application. As long as you follow the license to the letter, you are legally fine, and in my opinion as long as you follow the "spirit" of the license, you are morally fine.
I don't see this move by google as violating either of them. The director of Wikimedia might not like it, and that's fine, but Google is in no way under any obligation to stop what they are doing (again, legally or morally in my opinion).
Wikipedia can adjust their terms of use, but they themselves have a framework for how they can update their own terms, and part of that requires a 30 day comment period [0]. If they have issue with this, they can absolutely update their terms, but I would never donate to the wikimedia foundation again and would stop contributing if they are going to start deciding who is allow access to their data that they champion as "free and open".
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.
I didn't say that, and I disagree with that. The web isn't "default open", and Google has a license that you agree to when using their product that says what you can and cannot do with it. And scraping their site is against that "license" (aka the "terms of service") giving them both the legal and the moral right to stop you while keeping it "publicly" accessible.
Wikipedia's terms of service specifically state that anyone is free to read, print, share, and reuse their articles and other media under free and open licenses. They have no more right (moral or legal) to take issue with youtube including wikipedia snippets in their application than Linus Torvalds has the right to take issue with Google using Linux in their application. As long as you follow the license to the letter, you are legally fine, and in my opinion as long as you follow the "spirit" of the license, you are morally fine.
I don't see this move by google as violating either of them. The director of Wikimedia might not like it, and that's fine, but Google is in no way under any obligation to stop what they are doing (again, legally or morally in my opinion).
Wikipedia can adjust their terms of use, but they themselves have a framework for how they can update their own terms, and part of that requires a 30 day comment period [0]. If they have issue with this, they can absolutely update their terms, but I would never donate to the wikimedia foundation again and would stop contributing if they are going to start deciding who is allow access to their data that they champion as "free and open".
[0] https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Terms_of_Use/en