This seems interesting from a legal point of view as well:
Is an app downloading, but never displaying, creative commons content infringing on copyright (by not showing correct attribution and violating the CC terms)?
Besides copyright, could this be considered theft of service?
> This seems interesting from a legal point of view as well
Is it? If you make a resource freely available to people online, and people access said resource, what's the legal ramification there? It would appear there is no malicious intent which would be necessary to make the case for abuse, and theft of service would be a stretch given that Wikimedia doesn't charge for their service.
I think OP is referring to the fact that your device is internally making a copy of the image during the download process, yet the creative commons license requires that copies of an image have attribution. The terms of the license are therefore likely not being met.
Though it's interesting to think of the possible legal ramifications, I doubt there will be a court case. The "damages" looks like about ten terabytes of bandwidth, and lawyer fees would surpass that in days .
NTP domains have had a history of similar problems, and they seem to be resolved by apologizing, fixing the problem, and sometimes a donation.
I don't think this is theft. Nothing was stolen. At most Wikipedia suffered some damage in the form of slightly increased bandwidth costs. Also, theft is involuntary. The Wikipedia server has the power to simply refuse the connection.
It's difficult to steal something offered for free. You could try to charge them with attempted DDOS or something like that but since wikimedia did not suffer any actual degradation of service. I think that at most you can go for something like "causing harmful traffic through negligence" but you'd need to prove the traffic was actually harmful.
In any case let's not get carried away. 90 million requests for a 70KB file is only 5.8 TB. Wikimedia mentions in their about pages that they are hosted on bare metal servers in various places around the world. Just going on the bandwidth charges of the first provider in the list, that'd be about $30 USD per month if they have the "bulk" pricing or $300 USD per month if they use the list pricing. I don't think that is worth going to court over for the Wikimedia foundation.
Is an app downloading, but never displaying, creative commons content infringing on copyright (by not showing correct attribution and violating the CC terms)?
Besides copyright, could this be considered theft of service?