I made a little program last night. It checks my Google Voice for incoming texts and sends back a joke via SMS. Currently it gets the jokes from sickipedia (It crawls their random joke page repeatedly until it finds a joke with a score over 30 and less than 161 characters). You can try it by texting joke to [number redacted by moderator].
Is it even legal to do this? I’m taking their content, but they didn’t come up with jokes, and neither did most of the people who submitted them. I have no intention to make any money on this. Also, the jokes, on average, aren’t very good.
What I really need is some kind of database of jokes. A file with a thousand or so jokes. Does something like this exist?
[moderating]
I’m not sure if you are aware of how easy it is to identify someone given their phone number. A reverse white-pages lookup took me right to where you live. Thus, I’ve removed the phone number from your post. If you really do want to list it, go ahead, but think about it carefully first. I assume you’re posting here under a pseudonym because you want to be anonymous, and giving out your phone number defeats the purpose.
[/moderating]
And now speaking as a member rather than a moderator (but not a lawyer either way)…
No, it’s not legal to take someone else’s content and retransmit it. That’s a copyright violation. If you were to retell the jokes in your own words, that would be fine. If you got them from a site that specifically states they’re not claiming copyright, that’s fine, too.
Whether you’re making money on it is irrelevant.
Whether the jokes are good or bad is irrelevant.
All that said, I don’t think there’s a person among us who hasn’t read a joke somewhere and retold it - either orally, through email, through text message, through Facebook, through Twitter, or through smoke signals. Automating the process and sending out bundles of them is a different matter, though.
And one final note - ever thought about what would happen if a friend of yours had an autoresponder, too? She texts you, your program sends a joke, hers texts back that she’s not available right now, yours sends another joke, hers says she’s not available… If you keep some kind of system like this, make sure it won’t respond to the same number more than X times per day or per hour.
I just did a reverse lookup. All I got was a city. As far as I know Google doesn’t know my address, so I don’t see any danger. I’ll leave it redacted in case I’m wrong.
What you get depends on the site you use, and whether you’re willing to pay for it. For two bucks, there’s a site that will provide your name and address, given that phone number. But even if someone couldn’t get your name that way, you could still be harassed, and we don’t want to be the vehicle someone uses to harass you. That’s why the registration agreement says: