Murray Fox wrote:
I think you're choosing to miss the point(s) :-) This is the National Library of NEW ZEALAND, ripping sites over international links, with blatant disregard for those sites wishes with regard to robots, and with no direct communication to the site owner / maintainer. The practical upshot of this is that real people running sites in NZ face increased international bandwidth bills this month thanks to the actions of the National Library [1]
Well I'm not sure I am missing the point. If you published a book in NZ you'd need to provide two copies of it at your cost to them. And that's not unique to NZ. You don't get the option to say it was a bit expensive for us to provide those two copies so we've sent you the cover and the title page. I agree that they could have handled this better but perhaps the issue of the bandwidth costs is one where some of the anomalies in our bandwidth pricing structure, lack of peering by the controlling duopoly and availability of skills to do this work meant that doing it this way constitutes the best cost structure for Natlib to get this information that they are now required to attempt to collect. As a taxpayer I'd hope they are taking that approach. Looks like this activity will continue - the question really is how does the community best engage with the library to make it as painless as possible.