I recently covered how to make a mirror of a website with GNU’s wget command line program and in the comments of that post there were several suggestions for more advanced options which allow you to control your downloading further.
So I’ve decided to follow up on that post and look at some of the more advanced options that wget offers the user.
GNU’s wget command line program for downloading is very popular, and not without reason. While you can use it simply to retrieve a single file from a server, it is much more powerful than that and offers many more features.
One of the more advanced features in wget is the mirror feature. This allows you to create a complete local copy of a website, including any stylesheets, supporting images and other support files. All the (internal) links will be followed and downloaded as well (and their resources), until you have a complete copy of the site on your local machine.
In its most basic form, you use the mirror functionality like so:
$ wget -m http://www.example.com/
There are several issues you might have with this approach, however.
Ars Technica is reporting that the Motion Picture Association of America have been hit with a DMCA takedown notice after offering a download of an Ubuntu-based networking monitoring tool without source code, a direct violation of the GPL.
The MPAA software was supposedly designed to assist universities in detecting people using software to download and share copyrighted material and was apparently based on the Ubuntu Linux distribution.
The obvious irony here is that in trying to distribute a piece of software designed to prevent copyright infringement, the MPAA have - infringed copyright by breaking the GPL licence. Leaving that irony aside for a moment though, and it’s clear that Matthew Garret, who filed the DMCA takedown on behalf of the Ubuntu team, is sending out a clear message - that GPL violation is exactly the same as violating any other copyright.
Those who aren’t fans of the free software/open source movement often cite their doubt as to whether the GPL is enforceable, especially when you are dealing with individuals rights, who don’t necessarily have the legal resources to chase up all possible violators. In this case, the MPAA obviously realised that not complying was definitely not an option, as the commercial arms involved in Ubuntu (and possibly others) would have piped up and put pressure on them.
Would this have happened with a small GPL’d project with limited resources, however, if a similar violation happened? It’s not really an easy question to answer, although there are efforts such as GPL Violations to raise awareness of smaller violations of this nature.
Enforcing the licences is definitely important. It’s important to send the message out to potential exploiters that there are consequences for not following those terms.
