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Judge Bars eBay Crawler
matty writes: "A judge has said that Bidder's Edge could no longer use its crawler to gather information from eBay. 'Even if its searches use only a small amount of eBay's computer system capacity, Bidder's Edge has nonetheless deprived eBay of the ability to use that portion of its personal property for its own purposes.' So what about Yahoo! and all the other search engines? Don't they use similar technology? Read the article and see for yourself." Or maybe it's not such a bad precedent; it'd be interesting if such a ruling helped discourage hard-drive searching by software which searches for "undesirable" content without your consent or knowledge.
- No public/anonymous browsing - have to log on to see eBay content.
- Make it against usage agreement to use bots
- Make the site bot-friendly either through optimised pages or a separate connection (ODBC-esq)
- Enter into specific licencing agreements with 3rd parties to allow sorting, sifting and filtering of eBay contect. If they breach the licence, pull their access.
Easy. Then the courts don't have to rule that the public aren't allow to use publicly accessible information if the provider doesn't like the way you look at them.This is entirely short sighted, unrealistic, and fails to take into account any real world scenerios.
The internet is a public place, no different from the local shopping mall, grocery store, public library, movie theater, whatever...
When you go to the mall they expect that you will and won't do a number of things, commonly accepted criteria for activity in a public place (read: no shirt, no shoes, no service).
On the internet nobody gives a damn if your in your shorts, but suddenly your not allowed to do any number of things that you could realisticly do physically.
For example, lets say I'm doing market research and I send 50 people to the local mall to run around and look at what kind of (product) is being sold, and how many of them, and how much they cost. This is perfectly legitimate, and legal since that information is publicly available. I probably can't go into the stock room and see how many of (product) are not on the shelves, but I can certianly just have a look around the store (just like anyone else).
If we apply the latest internet precidents to this senerio I would NOT be allowed to do this without breaking the law. Suddenly I would be using that stores resources and denying them use of that resource for whatever reason they deemed more important. So I'm not allowed to go the store if I'm just window shopping now?
Publicly accessable resources are held up to a very high standard. Anyone can find out how much a store charges for , this is good for everyone, the store, the customers, the manufacturers.... The same applies (or should apply) to the internet.
As far as purely internet related impact is concerned, can anyone who hosts a site look through their server logs and sue anyone who connects to their site to much? Or all those search engines that come through on a regular basis? Or anyone that pre-caches the site automatically (gee, this is even a feature in Internet Explore... more MS trials?).
My opinion: The internet is a public place, and fair use of a public place is already governed by a certian set of rules and regulations (at least here in the US). Let these rules and regulations do their job and stop creating "special regulation" for a situation that isn't radically different from anything else we humans do on this planet. Just because you do something on the internet doesn't mean it requires special regulation. -Gentry
At first blush, it seems like this is a stupid ruling, mainly for the reasons the judge gave for making it. He claims that they are essentially stealing cycles from eBay's servers and this could slow down ebay's service and have a negative impact on their customers' experience.
This is just plain stupid; if you have a page on your website which is viewable by the public then it is available for the public to download. That's the point of having a public website. Hey, I'm a customer of eBay's, am I guilty of using server cycles and slowing down the eBay website for other customers? You bet. eBay should secure the entire site and require authentication if they really want to pick and choose who can view.
On the other hand, I think what Bidder's Edge does is really indefensible from an ethical standpoint and I am rooting for them to lose because they are in effect *competing* with eBay for advertising dollars by *using* eBay's content. If you view content from ebay through Bidder's Edge, that's advertising revenue eBay doosn't get which BE does. Seems really lousy.
So it seems like the right ruling, but for totally the wrong reasons. The way the judge worded things it sounds like you could make a case for suing Yahoo, AltaVista, Google etc., if they dare to spider your site.
Whot crap!
-- "Vote Democrat. Because the current crop of conservatives are just bugnut crazy."
This is absolutely awful. Republicans in the US always like to use the term "legislating from the bench" to describe rulings by liberal judges which overstep the bounds of the case being argued. This is actually worse -- the judge is essentially making up technological terms as he goes along. Using someone's resources that they can never get back? Give me a break, the crawler that Bidder's Edge uses uses an infinitesimal amount of EBay's and other auctions' server capacity compared to the legions of "legitimate" EBay users. This judge is speaking from pure ignorance, and his ruling endangers everything the Web is based upon.
Where do you draw the line? Are we only going to allow "manually" retrieving information from a Web site? What does that mean? Do I have to write code for each page I want to see? Are offline browser caches now going to be illegal since they automatically "drill down" into sites and grab several pages at a time for later viewing?
When you create a Web site, you do it under the implicit assumption that people are going to connect to it and retrieve informaton. End of story. There is no "right" to only have your pages viewed by means you approve of. Every time _anyone_ connects to your site they use some of your resources, and doing it by automated means is no more onerous than by doing it "manually".
here is http://search.ebay.com/robots.txt:
It isn't like eBay is disallowing access to everything, crawlers are allowed to index anything on www.ebay.com (no robots.txt) and whatever is not excluded search.ebay.com. IMO whether the judge knows it he is upholding a standard and that is a good thing.Citrix
Leknor
http://Leknor.com
"So many idiots, so few comets"