[kbenson]

> I believe that sites can implement technical measures to "enforce" a fairly normal request profile.

Doesn't that make some projects and uses, where it needs more than what is regularly allowed, impossible? I think the natural response to that would be "well, we'll just charge them (something/more) and give them special access beyond our normal restrictions", and we're back at square one. Enforcing everyone gets the exact same access is essentially communist theory, not mean in an inflammatory way, but in that it really does enforce some level of mediocrity on everyone (to be fair, as insurance some bad actors makeing things untenable for the rest) in comparison to an approach that allows some companies to pay for for extra access to account for the extra burden which may result in new products that people want.

I'm for making publicly available data available to use as wanted, but I'm not really for enforcing arbitrary limits that prevent whole classes of useful products that people generally might want in the name of being fair, especially when "being fair" might mean contradictory things depending on the side you approach from. The fact that the data is generated by the users, and ownership may or may not reside with users or the aggregator, and current law may not be the best with regard to that just makes it all the more complex. :/

[cookiecaper]

I think we're having a communication issue here again. I do appreciate your willingness to continue the discussion, because it helps me find the points that are unclear and that need refinement, so thanks for that.

I don't think we should force companies not to have a paid API, that's all well and good. What I want to remove is their ability to stop scrapers from gathering the data from the generic public interface just because they don't like the way the scraper is using the information.

[kbenson]

Yeah, we're mostly in agreement on that. I don't believe in locking down data that is provided free of charge to the public in one manner from other methods of access (i.e. eyeballs vs scraping) in any way beyond normal usage rate limiting that applies equally to all.

As it pertains to this specific story, I think Twitter was well within their rights and norms to try to move a special cased user to some more traditional offering of their, or to at least make them justify their usage. I also think it's well within Emojitracker's rights and is acceptable to try to make a public stink if they think they are getting a raw deal. The only thing that I think leaves a bad taste in my mouth is that he did so prior to attempting a good faith negotiation with Twitter.