[pd-discuss] PRESS RELEASE : Gale releases all its public domain content freely on the open web

Wed Jan 9 19:57:53 UTC 2013

I know the Brits have funny names, but seriously, "Marmaduke."  That might
have been a clue right there.

What this guy/gal has discovered is that their page image server uses
"security through obscurity" as it's only protection and that the URLs have
the form

http://callisto.ggsrv.com/imgsrv/Fetch?contentSet=<content
set>&recordID=<book id>-<page number zero padded to 5 digits>

so

http://callisto.ggsrv.com/imgsrv/Fetch?contentSet=SASM&recordID=SASO0102-R0002-00003

will get you the third page of the second book in the collection "American
Colonization Society: A Register of its Records in the Library of Congress"
in the Slave Manuscripts content set.

They're just encouraging people to steal as much Gale content as possible
(plus whatever else their download does).  If you want to steal content
without using their downloader, just plug the parameters for your favorite
books into the URL pattern.

Tom
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