What if somebody would write a spider (which respects common conventions like robots.txt etc) that searches for and archives publicly available SWF files, and a service that makes graphical assets found in those SWFs (vector shapes, bitmap images, videos, fonts, etc) available for public browsing, similar to what the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine does?
As SWF, at least according to Adobe, is an open format, this would be both technically and legally feasible, wouldn’t it? From a legal perspective, what line would need to be drawn where, and why exactly?
feasible, legal and ethical afaik. It would be no different than google images. Of course that doesn’t grant any usage rights etc. and you would probably want to dynamically retrieve the content rather than store it.
Why not? Perl has been doing this for over a decade; arguably, its CPAN repository (www.cpan.org) is (was?) at least as important than Perl itself.
Not sure if I told you about swfchan before? Check it out http://swfchan.com/ “Archived flashes: 101049” It even tries to decompile swfs, e.g. http://swfchan.com/21/101188/info.shtml for example
Yeah i think you told me. I was looking into something a bit more elaborate though..