Viewing the source of a web page is ILLEGAL!

[pne]

...or so claims the HTML comment at the top of this page.

Whee.

Comments

[denial-land.livejournal.com]

BWHAHAHA. OMG, no I'm going to prison! It's too late! I saw it!

Wow.

[pne.livejournal.com]

The FBI is already on its way to your door. You have violated International copyright restrictions, so they'll throw you into a US prison even though you're in Germany!

*snickers*

P.S. Your MOM is in prison.

[missysedai.livejournal.com]

"Dear Mr. Plagiarist Parker,

You're an asshat and an intellectual property thief, not one thing on your site is original content. Additionally, international copyright law does not preclude users from looking at your miserable source code. Please unplug your computer and never bother the internet again.

Sincerely,

Laughing My Ass Off In Toledo Ohio"

[missysedai.livejournal.com]

Oh hell. He's gonna sue my employer, too:

"crawling, using spiders[...] is strictly forbidden and violates international copyright laws."
http://www.websters-online-dictionary.org/credits/termsofuse.html

[pne.livejournal.com]

Darn.

I guess Robots are expected to read the Terms of Use in addition to http://www.websters-online-dictionary.org/robots.txt - which don't mention the URL tree starting at /definition.

Looks like you're going to be out of a job soon.

[catamorphism.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's really going to hold up in court.

[catamorphism.livejournal.com]

Besides, aren't they violating copyrights by using the name of Webster's Dictionary without their permission?

Webster's

[pne.livejournal.com]

As far as I know, the name "Webster's" is not copyrighted and any dictionary can refer to itself as "Webster's".

[haela.livejournal.com]

Does that mean that every web browser in existence is in violation of copyright law and thus it's illegal to use the internet?

[pne.livejournal.com]

I suppose so.

His Terms of Use (http://www.websters-online-dictionary.org/credits/termsofuse.html) say that they "forbid [...] any activity that increases bandwidth" (which, I suppose, includes reading the page in a browser) as well as forbidding users to "electronically copy any pages" (which the operating system does when it takes bits from the network and makes them available in the memory allocated to the browser).

We're all jailbait.

[nik-w.livejournal.com]

I'm going to print that out at work tomorrow and we can all laugh at it!

[sovereigna.livejournal.com]

I'm gonna have nightmares after looking at that close up of Michael! :S

(they're just trying to scare the ignorant with the illegal threat- the rest of us can just laugh. It's not like he has anything worth stealing anyway).