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Metabrowsing Controversy Continues
sonnerbob noted that Yahoo is running a story about the ongoing controversy surrounding metabrowsing. This one mentions eBay of course, but others like Priceman and Ticketmaster. The long term effects of this stuff is incredibly significant: if the courts go the wrong way, it could even make things messy for the big search engines.
Eventually, someone will come up with an open sourced gnutella type application that acts as a personal search engine to do price comparisons on ecommerce sites....thus ebay, etal will have no one entitiy to sue...instead, there will be millions of "bidder's edge" and "auctionwatch" personal sites searching for the best price, instead of one centralised website...
The company will be hurting themselves, as they would close themselves off to any possible customers from the pricing site. Sure, potential customers may tend to go for the lowest priced (although there are often other factors at work such as service), but they certainly won't choose a vendor who doesn't show up at all.
That's insane. Companies want to be on search engines, how else are people going to find them? Unless a search engine is inappropriate for the company to be listed on (for example, a company may not want to be on a porn search engine and seem thus affiliated), there's no reason they wouldn't want to have a listing; and there's certainly few reasons that a search engine would want to pay to list a company...if people miss the company's URL on a search engine, chances are they already know it and don't need to search for it.
--
Aaron Gaudio
"The fool finds ignorance all around him.
"Every man is a mob, a chain gang of idiots." - Jonathan Nolan, Memento Mori
That's probably because E-Bay's prices are insufficiently creative to qualify for copyrights. Phone books traditionally can't be copyrighted either - they're just names and addresses and numbers.
Still this is all pretty bogus. E-Bay should charge a transaction fee on each auction, mediate the transfer of funds (holding it in escrow) and be happy to have other sites link to it.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Once you decide that it is OK for a site to ban "personal spiders," where do you stop? Would I be in violation of such a policy if I use Avantgo to download a hierarchy of pages into my Palm Pilot? Where, really, do you draw the line between acceptable "browsers" and unacceptable "spiders"? How would you feel about a web site whose copyright notice bars access to anyone using a web browser other than IE5? And just where does that leave my fair use rights to copy copyrighted material for research and education? Only legal with Canon copy machines?
I guess E-bay is taking off it's gloves by saying you can not search information on my site that might harm me. This can also be look at as anti-competive behavior we may have a another lawsuit on our hand here.
Those jewelry stores and auto shops don't hide their prices unless you're really buying "due to complicated pricing" -- no way!
It's just so you won't be able to comparison-shop.
(So yes, I guess there really *is* a parallel...)
Christian R. Conrad
My ISP is the Saunalahti company, of Finland.
Christian R. Conrad
mail me at iki.fi ; same user ID as here
That used to be a good argument back when Veronica mapped Gopher-space, and lots of Gopher servers were on mainframes and the like where people paid (in blood) for CPU time - including the people running the Gopher servers.
But is that really an argument these days? What is the difference between a robot and a visitor who hust browses everything without using the services you gain income from (including ads)? If your site cannot handle the occasional crawler robot, how can it scale to, say, five extra users?
What you are saying is that the site should set a cookie, then check whether the user actually uses their "real" services, and if not, deny them access after some predetermined time?
Sounds like a recipe for disaster.
I'd like to know by what piece of logic they say spiders are tresspassing, and people who browser but don't buy aren't.
It comes down to $$$ in the end, like most things. Spiders don't click on adverts. People, while they may not always shop or whatever, DO see these adverts. If a site cannot say that on all the pageviews it gets that they aren't actual PEOPLE staring at their ads then that site may well lose ad revenue.
Of course you cannot stop people deep-linking your site, but if you do not make the links well known (i.e. indexed) then a great number of people would not know the URL to start with, apart from those that HAVE 'come in the front door' so to speak.
--
Delphis
They can't pick and choose who they allow into the store to shop, but they can eject people who come into the store and violate the store's shopping rules. Relevant to this situation, many stores will kick you out for taking photos or otherwise appear to be acting like a "secret shopper" from another store. I've always been puzzled by this -- you can walk in, look around, etc, but I suppose they don't want their presentation, products, so easily "analyzed" by competitors via photographic means.
IE: a department store, cannot pick out a specific individuals and claim they are trespassing while allowing the rest of the public free access.
This is completely FALSE. Perhaps you have never seen one of the signs that state "We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone."?
Department stores use video surveilance and eject from the premesis known and suspected shoplifters.
Casinos are known for ejecting 'professional' gamblers.
Is a 'thief of content' any better than a shoplifter? Not in my book. I reserve the right to refuse access to anyone I choose. And I have. My server rejects requests from several content scanning agencies who do not provide public search services.
-- This sig is only a test. If this were a real sig it would say something witty. --
Sheer volume maybe... When we consider value however, I think you meant to say square root.
If you've got a problem with that view of the value of a network, take it up with Metcalf.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
E-Bay is being totally daft as are all the other litigants who go running to the courts to cut off competition.
I swear I had no idea of the capabilities of Sherlock 2 before I write that - I'd be curious to see how well the shopping plugin worked! I'll have to try that out on a G4...
I wonder if they have published the API for the plugins so e-commerce sites could write one for themselves? I am sadly ignorant of details of current Mac development, though I look forward to OS-X with great anticipation.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Do you understand robots.txt? It not only allows you to specify what areas, but also what spiders are allowed to visit. Are you for or against this?
It's not about copyright, but about someone who was specifically asked to stop an intrusive action from doing so.
If I knocked on your door, do you think you would have a chance in hell of getting a restraining order from a judge because it was a nuisance? Certainly not. Now what if I knocked on your door every five minutes 24 hours a day?
When it becomes excessive, and I've asked you to cut it out, and you ignore my polite requests, then the law steps in a brings the force of goverment against you. This is true for anything, and it will be true for the web.
Make no mistake, eBay is cutting it's own throat by this attempt at network domination, but it's their throat to cut..
To purchase it is not like spending money but rather it is an investment in the future in a blow against the empire
I wish that eBay would offer a replicated server that data could be extracted from. I, myself, would find it handy, and would be able to make some really cool apps. The only problem is that some people won't play nice, and it would end up deadlock city. Too bad there isn't a good way to make this happen (aside from certifying people, and cutting out the little guy who wants to make soemthing cool).
To me, "Information wants to be free" just means that since it is intangible, can be copied easily, and can be "stolen" without depriving the original owner, it is acting as if it were a sentient entity which wanted to be free.
Don't confuse that with "people want information to be free" because many people don't. That much isn't a contradiction. Thus, no, you may not have my SSN.
I don't see the problem here. Ok, so companies will be able to opt out of price guides and such. fine, f*&# 'em. as the article points out they will be the higher priced ones anyway. I will continue to use pricewatch.com and similar services. Since the opted-out companies don't show up I won't buy anything from them. I will buy from the ones that allow their site to be indexed.
the same goes for search engines. if these people opt of of the search engines they won't get my hits b/c I will never find them. again, their problem, not mine.
to use the analogy presented earlier of somebody sending a person to check prices... if my buyer isn't allowed to look in a certain store for that book he will just move on and find a store that doesn't mind. and guess what... my money will go to the other store.
I don't see a problem here.
Yes, if you look around eBay there are numerous banner ads. Bidder's Edge is very likely costing them money by running crawlers.
That said, I still have the gut feeling that eBay is wrong on this one. Though that might be because I worked at Bidder's Edge for a time.
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Hmmm... last time I checked the advertising revenue model worked exactly the opposite. Ebay gets paid when a banner impression happens on their site. Since BE crawls the site without retrieving banners, no banner revenue is generated. Cost number one.
Cost number two is the fact that BE deep links to item pages which don't contain banners. So, anyone who finds an eBay item one BE finds it without finding the (minimum of 3 by my count) banners that it would take them to find it.
Cost number three is the fact that eBay sees BE as a competitor. Well, maybe not a direct competitor, but at least a competitor enabler. BE legitimizes smaller, boutique auctions on the internet. eBay does not stand to gain nearly as much from BE as their competition does. So, they're going to do anything they can to make life difficult for BE.
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You could even develop a simple standalone app that had plugins for various sites you wanted to do price searches on, and let the users download the plugins.
Okay, done. No shit, Sherlock. :)
For more information, click here.
Whats next? The blind sueing eBay, MSN, AOL, ...
No, that already happened. Last year, no less.
For more information, click here.
But what happens if I am keeping an eye on an specific item and bookmark it so I can jump straight to it? huh? There's no referer so I would get redirected which stinks and would interfere with ebays business.
It also looks like you missed the maint point of the post too, there are robots.txt files but they are being ignored, which in all fairness is not right.(Although this doesn't mean that what is happening in this lawsuit is right).
Once I had a Blockbuster employee try to stop me from photographing from the street and I told him to get lost or call the cops; from the public sidewalk, you can photograph anything you want. One could make an analogy that anything involving entry of search terms might be illegal (with proper notice), while static pages are "publically visible" and therefore, tough nuts, don't put it up, or drop their packets. I'm not saying that's correct, but it's a down-the-middle solution I haven't seen anyone discuss...
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
Freedom of speech is important, yes, but remember that freedom can be revoked when it threatens and infringes on the rights of others.
WHAT!
No. Wrong. Who ARE you that you think this? In the most general of terms the First Amendment doesn't cover speech that SPECIFICALLY endangers others (the old -- you can't yell fire in a crowded movie theatre)
Please please please don't go through life thinking that your various civil freedoms are that easy to take away.
I suppose that the market has to rotate. Right now, as we, all know, companies are paying to get listed on the major engines. And I honestly don't ever see a big site/company refusing to be listed at all. I could see the big sites refusing links to anything but their splash/ad page.
Can't you see the engine/portal ads now: Go directly to the page you want in Companys X Y and Z without wading through their interface - only at Engine A! Ick. Welcome to the World Wide Billboard.
-- I'm not evil, I'm
Not likely. Cutting yourself off from the major search engines would be like cutting your own throat. Yahoo, Altavista, Google and the like are providing companies a major service by referring people to the companies' sites.
I doubt they'll completely cut off the search engines. Maybe Ebay will cut off other auctioners from its site, but I doubt the search engines will die (unless Gnutella kills them off!)
---------------------------------
"We're sorry, but the website you're trying to reach has been disconnected."
What are we free to do legaly and why?
In america, it is what does not infringe on money making!
What part does money have in it?
All the difference in the world!
-If this was a spyder that went every day to search through the Stanford University Research Paper archive and gave out the number and links to Copywrighted papers, we would have no discussion. EBay makes money so boo hoo. They are being infringed upon. Give it up. IT is not a question but an excuse to infringe on our freedom. What happens when this goes on for research. When you cannot search for facts and information on the web. All over a bit of cash. Boo hoo for EBay. They should be proud that you can be better informed on the web. That is what it is about. Information moves faster. Information for better or for worse.
Moderate me up please. This is the heart of the matter.
- Kill Yourself, spare us all! -
Is there a law against this? If WalMart wants to sell pencils for $20, shouldn't it be allowed to?
I guess the issue is whether or not this falls under "fair use"? Would the MySimons spend money on development and servers if they knew they wouldn't be able to get any revenue from it, even from banner ads?
--
Why doesn't ebay just deny connections from the machine the spider is on? No more problems for them...
Opinions expressed above are mine, and not my employees'.
Think of it as Yugo slapping their own logo on BMWs, without permission from BMW, while they figure out how to build a real car.
Nothing to stop these meta-sites from starting their own version of ebay.
So you don't visit Napster, I guess... ?
;-)
Seriously, I agree with you for the most part. The most interesting angle of this debate to me is the whole robots.txt thing - As someone above said, it should be obeyed, regardless. If you want to publish prices from eBay, you go through like any other surfer and copy-paste by hand.
The Divine Creatrix in a Mortal Shell that stays Crunchy in Milk
The House Between - Original Sci-Fi Series
An interesting question is how does this controversy extend to software operating on a personal machine. Example : If I write a script to do the searches for me personally and run it on my machine, will I be infringing on e-bays or others sites rights. It seems to me that e-bay wants us to access information but on their terms not ours.
And further what if I hand that script to a friend (or sell it to someone) and they use it.
I can't see why this wouldn't be ok, since it is only using the computer for what it was made for (to automate repetitive, monotonous tasks) and its only one step further to have someone else do the searching for you
I totally agree, also if you are required to obey robots.txt files then you should also be able to stop email harvesting spiders in the same manner.
(or at least be able to sue them if they do not)
AdFuel
Costing them money by running crawlers? How's that?
I think he means costing them in the sense that a certain number of people are surfing and viewing banners over at bidder's edge where they can get info on ebay auctions, rather than navigating ebay and viewing thiers. The assumption being that if ebay auction data was NOT available anywhere but ebay, those folks would be at ebay racking up ebays eyeball count instead of at bidder's edge.
"I will gladly pay you today, sir, and eat up
Sacred cows make the best burgers.
<tongue firmly in cheek>
It occurs to me that if one stands back from the jargon and abstractions we've developed to describe things we "do", then it's easily seen that nobody is trespassing, nobody is gaining access to anything, nobody is going anywhere. All thats happening is people are using machinery to send impulses across wires. Now lets talk about who owns packets.
"I will gladly pay you today, sir, and eat up
Sacred cows make the best burgers.
They just didn't want to share the market with anyone. If you wanted to look up a web auction, they wanted you to go to Ebay.com, and Ebay only. Bidder's Edge was allowing people to find auction sites they had never heard of, and Ebay (with it's huge mindshare) didn't like it.
Very nicely put, and truly, the crux of the matter. The discussions of the legalities and analogies and possible precedents are fascinating for sure, but I think its a sure bet nobody at ebay is cogitating like this - all they give a shit about is keeping the golden goose to themselves.
"I will gladly pay you today, sir, and eat up
Sacred cows make the best burgers.
I increase visability and sales of your products and you sue/jail me. "Well Nancy, The Commies won"
I would think that you would want your products listed in EVERY MetaSearcher. Availablity and Deliverability are the Big sellers not just price point(the main issue I would guess).
It turns out these kind of arrangements actually contribute to price fixing, i.e., they constitute a form of collusion. Because if you (as a retailer) know your competition is constantly aware of your pricing and quick to match it, there is no competetive advantage in offering your customers discounts. Think about it: in a normal market, decreased prices lead to decreased profits, but increased volume; if your competitor matches the discount, volume remains flat while total profits decline. So both stores maintain artificially high prices (in theory).
Kook9 out.
I only see this as a problem with price comparison lists. Some of those lists are picky now. I've seen them favor one product over another simply by not including a product because the product competes with some form of finacial income of the company producing the list.
Let say Company A, selling widgets A & B, tells Yahoo, "I don't want you searching here", and they tell Lycos, "You can search here". If you don't use a metabrowser, this would effect you. I use metabroswers that go to search engines and compile the lists from them. This makes more sense to me. That way I should get Company A's web site from Lycos if it matches my specifications with a high enough score to make the count of total items I want. In reality, that is what I want when I use a search engine. I want the matchs sorted in the relation to the score, and not by the location they came from whether it was a search engine or something else. I use programs like Copernic 2000 and Web Ferret for such purposes.
In short, if you are using a good metabrowser, it will not be relevant whether Company A is listed in Yahoo. You should get is from Lycos if it makes the grade and your meta browser looks at Lycos. If the metabrowser doesn't support Lycos, then Company A may not get me as a customer. That would reflect bad planning on their part, and it would their responcibility to change the situation.
I don't do much shopping on the net, but I can see how this could upset the people that use the net for price comparison.
At the next eco-hypocrisy-meeting, count the private jets used to get to the meeting. Should be interesting to see that
There is no enlightenment, this is an uninformed judge giving in to a frivolous lawsuit that has the wording to make browsing with unapproved software illegal and punishable.
As I understand copyright laws, then unless you give someone explicit permission they don't have any permissions. If that's correct, then maybe a missing/empty robots.txt should be taken as a "Do Not Enter!" sign.
I realise this will probably give web-masters more to do, and possibly more complex robots.txt files, but I also thing that it would make people/companies consider more carefully what and how they publish on the web.
It's a thought anyway.
I'm sorry, but they can do just that. A store CAN exclude people from coming in and writing down prices. Best Buy (for example) has kicked people out of the store for writing down prices on, say, VCRs. The people who do this are usually under-cover employees from Circuit City, Radio Shack, etc who want to compare prices. Best Buy is well within their rights (legally) to ask these individuals to leave. This actually happens a lot at stores like these.
This is very similar to robots browsing around for prices on web sites. I'm not going to argue weither metabrowsing is good or bad, I'm just saying the eBay has a valid argument on telling these robots to buzz off, as well as exclude certain traffic from entering the site.
Buses stop at a bus station
Trains stop at a train station
On my desk there's a workstation....
> Instead of a blanket ruling disrupting more
> than one business plan, the ruling could apply
> to anyone ignoring the robots.txt is in
> violation.
Your missing one thing which is why this ruling could not take place. Its simple, ebay does not (well did not as of yesterday) have a robots.txt that actually said "don't index this site". ALL it did was instruct robots to avoid certain CGI directories.
> Yuck. That is like asking each and every store
> you visit if you can come in
Yup. Its a matter of what they want to do. The more they inconvinence their customers, the more customers they will lose.
Its sounds like their goal is to prevent customers from having an easy way to comparison shop with sites outside of their own.
Hopefully, for the sake of consumers, they will find that this is infeasable.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
I don't have a problem with this. I think its wonderful when net businesses choose to shoot themselves in the foot like this. Eventually there will be so many laws that running a business on the Internet will cease to be worthwhile. No more Etoy/Etoys, no more lame ass trademark domain disputes. Yeah there'll be a ministry of information presiding over it all and strange unmarked vans mysteriously parked in your neighborhood all the time but that's a small price to pay to get to watch net businesses crash and burn.
-Spazimodo
Fsck the millennium, we want it now.
Fsck the millennium, we want it now.
Millennium Crisis Line: 0890 900 2000 [calls cost 50p/min]
Today, they have small PDA-type scanning devices, which allow them to go into other stores, and secretly note prices for comparison.
While this is true, it's not that easy to implement. Say you deny *.googlebot.com. All they have to do is change what domain they are coming from- i.e., move some bots over to *.google.com. Maybe you're going to block 192.215.216.*? Then you just need to buy/reallocate another class C. -ted
Robots.txt makes no distinction between usages. We say that sites won't want to be comparison shopped if they're not the cheapest price, but what if they are the cheapest site ? There are many instances where spidering is beneficial to eBay, just as there are instances where it's against their interest.
I agree that robots.txt should be observed. Anything other than that is simply anarchy (in the sense of destructive nihilism, rather than the anarcho-syndicalism that built the Net).
Robots.txt isn't enough though. We're now into issues of usage, and (much as the Libertarians might not like it), that's where an appropriate level of legislation comes in. Indexing sites should have legal redress against others stealing their databases, vendors should be protected from customer poaching, customers should be protected from invasion of privacy.
I'm tired of saying this on Slashdot, but Go and read Lessig ! He explains why there isn't a "Law of the Horse", because pre-existing laws turned out to be perfectly adequate to regulate the appropriate use of horses, and the prevention of rustling. Similarly, the Net changes the context for many things, but the basic premises stay the same; businesses have various relationships with their customers, and we already have laws to protect these relationships, to the benefit of both business and customer.
Is there an XML robots.txt working group ? I suppose (grudgingly) I ought to join it, as this is almost exactly what we're working on these days.
but you could go into the library, make a list of the books contained there, and freely distribute that list without violating any copyrights,
Yes, absolutely.
There is no copyright on book titles. This is because the existing laws already recognise that the metadata on a book is different from the core data and should be treated differently. A library loses by having its data (book contents) stolen, but it gains by having its metadata (the catalogue of the content it can offer for sale) distributed.
At eBay, they don't have so much metadata. Data (for them) is the items they have for sale, their prices, and the contact details for buyers and sellers. eBay's business (in an RDF sense) is statements of the form, "I, Fred, agree to buy this gold-plated spork from you, Bill, for $52". All of these are core data to their business, valuable to competitors (and compilers of price guides).
I'm always being asked to define what "metadata" is (I'm an RDF geek, so this happens a lot). A reasonable definition in some circumstances is that it's the data you don't mind publishing to your competitors.
Just to be a devil's advocate:
>What's rational:
>
> 1) Let Linus alone, because his friends are buying my vacuum cleaners
>
> or:
>
> 2) Sue the hell out of Linus, because he's passing out stacks of MY BUSINESS CARDS THAT I SPENT A LONG TIME DESIGNING DAMMIT!
But Linus isn't just passing out stacks of your business cards. He is also passing out Bill's business cards and telling his friends "hey, don't even think about buying this loser's vacuum cleaners 'cause Bill's are cheaper!" And now lots of people who otherwise might have bought from you go to Linus first and end up buying from Bill instead. When I think about this, it doesn't seem too stupid for you to sue Linus. Not that it's right, mind you, but it's probably not stupid.
--
"Some mornings, it's just not worth chewing through the leather straps."
It would seem to me that unless you get the consent of each seller, you shouldn't be posting them elsewhere.
t
Hmm. Not sure I'd like that. I normally supress referrers on privacy grounds.
Require a referrer, and unless your content/products are pretty compelling and unique, you lose my business.
>>>>IE: a department store, cannot pick out a specific individuals and claim they are trespassing while allowing the rest of the public free access.
Well, yeah. Maybe.
Err....actually....no.
The golden rule applies here. He who has the gold makes the rules. Want a good example? Try looking a little *too* out of the ordinary in The Galleria in Houston, Texas. To protect their reputation as the most elite mall in the area, The Galleria owners long ago took a few cases to court and managed to establish a precedent that it is private property. The shoppers are there as invited guests, at the pleasure of the management only. And anyone can be ordered out at any time, just like you could order a guest out of your house for essentially any reason.
Put your hair up in a flame-pink mohawk, put on some studded leathers, show off some tattoos, and effect a menacing scowl. Then try to shop at The Galleria. You'll find yourself followed until enough backup can be rounded up. Then you'll be escorted out. Make more than a peep of protest and you'll find yourself waking up in the back of a squad car, wondering how you got all those bruises.
And no judge is going to give you a scintilla of sympathy.
So the judge in this case was wrong? So what? The law says what judges say it says. The Constitution means what the Supreme Court says it means. And when those rulings are not well thought out, like this one, we all suffer.
A friend of mine used to do this. Some place was paying her to do her shopping at different grocery stores each week and give them copies of the receits for price comparison. Not nearly as cloak and dagger, but harder to stop.
Insanity is the last line of defence for the master diplomat. But you have to lay the groundwork early.
According to the article, the ruling is based upon a legal precedent called Trespass To Chattels. However, this doesn't seem at all consistent with the definition of chattel. How can info on a web site be considered "personal, movable property?"
"The legitimate powers of government extend only to such acts as are injurious to others." Thomas Jefferson.
I don't believe eBay's objection was to having their content show up somewhere else, because people will still come back to eBay to close an actual transaction; rather it was that resources were being measurably soaked up by bot traffic, something in the 5 to 10% range at times, as I recall.
As that proportion grows further, and it certainly will, potential for denial-of-service enters in, keeping the people that the site was designed for, People Manually Using Browsers, increasingly disserviced.
A billion simultaneous hits from people might melt them down, but eBay would accept the challenge and scramble to meet the needs of their customers, a.k.a. People. They shouldn't have to double the size of the farm to accommodate bots.
eBay and every other site have designed an experience for People and should be allowed to restrict that only to People if they choose. Sites that do business based on pageviews and clickstreams will lose their livelihood if they can no longer document an audience of eyeballs vs. perl scripts. Darwin would even approve in that, for example, shopping sites that choose to not be part of The Harvested would fall off of the radar of the MySimon.coms of the world, and subsequently might fall off alltogether.
I work with some other large sites on both sides of the issue, where we develop bots to mine specific content, and where we watch others come in and do the same. The rules that work fine for us and should for everyone else:
- Use robots.txt; implement your own, and respect others'.
- Throttle yourself; don't open 30 simultaneous connections just because you can and it'll get done faster; behave just like a Person Manually Using A Browser instead of a GulpBot and you won't become a problem that has to be dealt with (or eventually legislated against).
It's a scheme based on courtesy, followed next by civil suits between disputing parties, and hopefully nothing further. A blanket treatment by the courts will likely be an all-or-nothing-ish ruling, giving bots access to everything or nothing, in either case, a disaster.
Again, the robots.txt scheme in use today works.
-- deej
Well Said. Does ebay make it's money through the commission on sales, or are they relying on banner revenue? I can see where sites that rely on page impressions would get torqued off by deep linking that bypasses their revenue generators, but ebay, com'on.
--
Costing them money by running crawlers? How's that? If you mean eBay has to pay for the banner impressions while the spider fetches pages then, as someone who's written a few crawlers, I seriously doubt the crawler would request *any* images off the eBay site. Why would a spider care about images? No use whatsoever!
-BK
Can a shopkeeper forbid you from ever sending again an iron robot disguised as a human in his store? Or maybe not.
...reasonable isn't what companies are after.
I agree with your solution and this is DEFINITELY one case where ALL or nothing makes sense, either you want your pages indexed or not.
The heart of the matter though isn't whether their pages can be metacrawled...it SEEMS that way, but its not. Its about using the court system as a legitimate tool of business, and its about misleading the customer. I mean, what does Ebay have to lose if a site displays the auctions on its site? I still have to bid there, I can't use another site. However, if BIGCOMPANY A has a mega web site with online shopping, BUT MEDIUMCOMPANY B also has one AND has significantly lower prices, BIGCOMPANY A would REALLY not want shoppers to have easy comparison...SO, they shut their site off from anything that will facilitate that and use the court's power to enforce this...
Its a game where only consumers will lose.
"I'm not a procrastinator, I'm temporally challenged"
If this was true, then Bill Gates could look at the source code for GPL software on a web browser and paste it into Windows, bypassing the GPL. Public display of information does not give it free to the public, but that has little or nothing to do with the issue at hand. The real question is whether or not eBay or any other company has the right to limit access to their site to that which want. IANAL but I'm pretty sure that they do as long as it's stated clearly on their site in some kind of Terms and Usage statement.
Not true.. Otherwise every person in the store would have an easment (spelling?) on the property. And just publishing something doesn't releive you of a copyright. You have the right to say "This copyrighted information is freely available from HERE and here alone. Any other source of this material is a violation of my copyright".
UPS Sucks
The problem isn't that the hits generated by the spider don't count as 'real' hits. These can be filtered out, and even if they couldn't, they're going to be a tiny percentage of hits on any site that gets enough traffic to make any money from advertising.
The real problem from the ad-space seller's point of view is that when you use a search engine, you view fewer pages at the target site: You search at the engine, then jump straight to the page of interest at the target site, for one page view. But if you go straight to the target site, you generate one page view for the front page, maybe a view for the search form page (if there's no form on the front page), one or more for the search results page(s), and one for your final destination - a total of at least 3 page views, and potentially more.
Information yearns for nothing, being the non-sentient thing it is. But as long as we're on the subject, do you mind giving me all of your pertinent personal information? Date of birth, full name, mother's maiden name, state-issued citizens' number (SSN :), criminal record, etc. It does want to be free, after all. Oh yeah, any logins and passwords you could supply would be helpful as well.
Ah, so only evil information wants to be free. Or information used for profit. Now, what is evil and what is for profit? (ignoring the legal definition for a second :) If I promise to never use your login and password for profit, will you still give it to me? :) is that you can't have total privacy and total freedom in the same world. Choose one or the other. Either all information is free...or I get to know your credit rating, criminal record, and what you ate for breakfast. AAnndd, when you add a construct like 'personal information should not be free', then I want to know just what is personal and what isn't - and why.
Adding artificial constructs (God, I love that phrase - I'm using it so much recently...) to blanket arguments, so as to limit their effects, pretty much negates them. (And, he did not specify 'information being used by evil corporations (what is an evil corporation?) or for profit'. He said 'information', a common mantra).
The truth (in my subject little world, that is
Eric
Does this mean that they could sue me if my cache engine starts to index there site to help speed up browsing for my users. Or what if, heaven forbid, it accesses ebay and another auction site at the same time. If you publish it on a web server and allow the world to read it, then you should welcome someone who helps you sort it and your users to get to what they want faster... IT CALLED CUSTOMER SERVICE!!!!
Is it possible to fart online?
The anology is an interesting one. Most supermarkets around here have employees who's job is to check the prices of their competitors. They don't try to prevent this, simply because they don't see anything wrong with it. They might as well escort people out if they look like they're just browsing.
Maybe Ebay have a fair point that the robots.txt file said they shouldn't do this. But from their point of view, how is it different from someone checking all the auction sites seperately?
Some of these sites have agreed with ebay to use a local cache. Auctionwatch might be one of them.
It does have one - http://cgi.ebay.com/robots.txt
Its on the cgi server rather than the web server.
(Warning. This post is slightly paranoid)
I get the feeling that ebay don't want to encourage people to use smaller sites. While an auction search will give a small benefit to ebay, it will really give a huge benefit to those sites that don't have many visitors.
Most items only get a handful of bidders. Normally it's not sensible to use a smaller site, simply because there will not be 2 people sufficiently interested to bid. This is of course a benefit to ebay. As long as only the tiny sites are searched, they will not be a threat
Unfortunately for ebay, auctions.yahoo.com, and various others are sufficiently large to make sure that these search engines are still worthwhile.
This Upside article pretty much summarizes most of the recent issues being litigated as a result of the Internet's gold rush and the turf protecting efforts by the big boys. I'm sure there are more, but expect this list to grow longer (I'm surprised no sites have complained about About.Com or AskJeeves framing external links within their own ad-displaying framesets. I guess reason reigns over most of the Web since framed sites ought to realize that these services bring in traffic so why bite the hand?)
Mambo dogface in the banana patch
Now when I used to run a shopping site that had a decent volume of traffic for such a start up there were many web crawlers running through our site. The only reason I ever blocked their access via the robots.txt file was when they started becoming a problem for the server/link capacity. Those very ill behaved services I added to the firewall deny rules for a month until they learned to behave.
I personally didn't care if someone wanted to use some search engine against the site. My only concern was that they play nicely and 1) not flood our line, 2) not kill the server, and 3) obey the robots.txt file.
I find this all very amusing since they are opening themselves up via public ports with known services and asking people to use there service. Now if people are allowed to use their public services having people using robotic spidering shouldn't be a problem so long as they method and results are not harmful. What I don't see is how can the free advertising being generated by this company be harmful?
Sure they don't get the number of hits and advertising viewing they would have as before, but what they get in return is a higher purchasing ratio to browsing ratio. What does this mean? It means that those going to the site are spending money and in many cases lots of it on items they really want.
Ok now that said user is on the site are they going to see the ebay banner ads? Of course they are and they might even start looking around for other things. Impulse buying, got to love it!
The only reason I can see for ebay to be upset about this is that they spider is killing their servers by trying to index everything to quickly. eBay should just get over it, consign themselves to realizing that they are offering a publicly available service and cannnot discriminate on their customer base. Doing so would likely bring the wrath of the various consumer organizations.
Whats next? The blind sueing eBay, MSN, AOL, ... for not using ALT tags on their images or making their sites unusabe for the blind with screen readers? So just how good is their conformance to the Americans with Disabilities Act anyways? (And everyone else for that matter...)
--
The program isn't debugged until the last user is dead.
The diffrence here is that Apple and EBay worked togather on the EBay plugin....
so EBay got to do "what it wants" and is happy. Plus it uses a diffrent, specially formatted search on EBay's website too.
Home, home and deranged...
If I ran google or inktomi or lycos or what the hell ever (who can keep track of all the search engines/indexers), I would remove all references to eBay from my indexes/directories and set my spiders to never index their site. I would do the same thing for anyone else who filed a metabrowsing lawsuit.
They don't want to be metabrowsed? Then I won't metabrowse them. It's fair.
The article states that sites might demand payment from a search engine before allowing the site to be indexed, which is the exact opposite of what happens now. We've all heard of engines being paid for the first result from a search for, say, coffee (this isn't a vague reference to anything, it really is just an example). I have serious doubt that most companies will want to exclude themselves from the only catalogs of the web that make any sense of it.
Couldn't this one day lead to a gnutella/freenet-like implementation, with the 'piracy' being 'underground' information and web searches, finding the best prices, pertinent information, etc. I for one would step up and help create such a system, after all, information yearns to be free.
You are more than the sum of what you consume.
You are more than the sum of what you consume.
Desire is not an occupation.
Interestingly, the raging.com search site that altavista recently opened, used to be off-limits to text browsers (Even though forging the header revealed that it worked just fine.) I sent them an e-mail requesting that the restriction be lifted, and never heard back, although I just checked a few minutes ago and apparently they've opened it at least to Lynx. If anyone of you text-only people use it, make sure to drop them an e-mail to let them know that we really do exist and appreciate it.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
This can be illegal also...a couple of years ago some guy was using his laptop to comparison shop local chain stores. One place threw him out, and did it again when he came back with a pad of paper and pencil. He lost the court case when they had him arrested.
Jeff
If I write a script to strain through all of the content on your site, and you have a huge site like ebay, I would think that it would hog a significant percentage of your cpu.
I wouldn't like my competitors to slow my site down for my customers, would you?
"If voting could really change things, it would be illegal. " - Revolution Books, NY
This is another example of how cyberspace and realspace don't mix too well. Most of us agree that our realspace laws don't work right in cyberspace. Our government obviously has not been convinced yet. The only way to convince our government is to keep bombarding them with issues. This meta-browsing may be the straw that breaks the cammel's back. Then again maybe not...
agree, but ebay did put a robots.txt file in their search directory and the robot in question disregarded it.
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
Perhaps you've never heard of something called competition. Let me instruct you. Competition is what keeps prices low and services high. This is why we don't live in a backwards third world country where people die of starvation because they don't have buying power.
What you describe above is what is supposed to happen. It is in Ebay's and everyone elses' interest that they can be put out of business by a rival. It is what forces businesses to provide the best service. Ebay should either adjust or die. Getting the courts to force people to not comparison shop will hurt everyone- including Ebay.
I don't understand why these companies keep fighting for things they would never tolerate outside of themselves.
"Is next, svimwear." Get it?
... and the converse is that people who *do* want to compete on price *will* make their sites available to price comparisons. So this particular ruling, despite the fact that's a little loopy, is hardly a threat to e-commerce.
The real problem, as with all IP laws, would be with enforcement. There's simply no way to protect tiny little chunks of intellectual property without creating a police state.
And the big players always have an advantage in these matters; they have "property" that's valuable enough that it justifies hiring lawyers. Tell a cop that somebody stole your car, and he'll at least try to help. Tell a cop that somebody stole your idea and he'll laugh at you. If the police won't help you protect your "property", then it isn't property, it's privilege.
so, if i understood this correctly, ebay claimed that it was tresspassing for bidman (or whoever) to make its living off ebay - because of the load it put on its servers. would it be possible to extend this to use it against slashdot? even though slashdot doesn't use a crawler or a spider, slashdot "makes its living" by linking to the content of other servers - generating a very significant load.
usually this would be a good thing - since slashdot links to the page, instead of quoting it, the site in question gets to serve its own advertising. but what about a smaller site, that collapsed under the slashdot load. could that site take action against slashdot?
wish
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>What I don't see is how can the free advertising being generated by this company
>be harmful?
Many people fall into the same trap - pretending that they're eBay, and deciding whether or not eBay should ask BiddersEdge to stop. That's not the point - the point is whether eBay can ask/force BiddersEdge to stop. You and I can't determine what is in eBay's best interests; only eBay can.
If this becomes a larger issue later on then I feel that the issues are best addressed with technology rather than legislation.
I hate seeing matters such as this brought to the court system. A system filled with people making decisions about technology they may or may not fully understand, after all, they're judges and lawyers not Linux kernel hackers and systems administrators.
I feel this way in spite of the fact that Yodlee is a personal threat to my site. I work for a company providing account information on the internet. We have worked hard and spent millions of dollars to provide this service and secure our site from hackers only to find that our users are willingly giving their login credentials to Yodlee.
Yodlee has become a repository housing many of our users login ids and passwords. Is it secure? Hell if I know. They have some legalistic tripe at signup intended to shield them from responsibility. If a user's account gets compromised though, you can bet that they'll come after us rather than Yodlee. I never even knew this was going on until I was investigating some strange accesses to our site which suggested an ill behaved robot.
I guess my point is that while I understand the temptation for litigation in these issues, however, technology is much better equipped to handle these problems.
-- Good judgement comes with experience. -- Experience comes with bad judgement.
Exactly what actions on the part of Bidder's Edge are considered "trespassing"?? Were they spidering eBay and storing all the relevant data into their OWN database x amount of times a day to be accessed by users' queries throughout the day? Or were they just using some cgi-string hack to access eBay's database and show the most current prices? If it is the latter, then I could see where they could consider that "unauthorized access" to their database. It would be a question not of whether it is okay to mine someone's site for data but HOW it is done.
HTTP header ad space for rent! Advertise to thousands of server log readers - only $50 a week per header! 1-800-SURFALOT
How does this address the issue of propriety? EBay may not want it's listings indexed, but that alone doesn't justify it's case. If they want to restrict access, then why not require that you register and log in before browsing their listings. That would stop the automated indexing (unless it's possible to program a bot to be a registered user, heh). I totally understand eBay's gripe...but does that justify a decision in its favor? I don't think so.
Get Veiled
Smart business move for eBay...maybe. But that's not the point. If eBay gets its way, the court's decision provides a foundation for a litany of Web-unfriendly decisions that will kill the free exchange of information. I think there are alternatives that eBay can employ rather than going to the courts that will preserve its business model. I worry that trying to prevent deep linking, framing, spidering, metalisting, whatever through the courts or regulators is a dangerous route and one we should be taking very seriously.
Get Veiled
Gawd...I think we all understand eBay's motivation. The challenge isn't understanding it. It's whether they can use legal means to make such behavior actionable. eBay should erect technical defenses, not try to mold the Web into a legal pretzel to support its own business model (or rather, eBay can waste it's legal budget doing so, but the courts and legislature shouldn't support it.)
Get Veiled
You don't lose it when your site becomes commercial. You don't lose it when your site becomes large. You don't lose it when your site becomes popular. You lose it when eBay's lawyers write to you and tell you that they want you to stop. That's when eBay takes back the permission to use the site. Any use you make of the site before you get that letter is OK. If you keep going back after you've been evicted and told never to return, that's tresspassing (according to the judge).
Respectfully, David Tallan
There are two sides to this issue. The first is that the Supreme Court has already said that the Internet is like television or a newspaper. So it falls under the same category when it comes to the information served up by the various sites. So a company's information is free and should remain that way.
But look at the second side of this issue. When another company begins banging away at a site just to get the information out of it then that company is guilty of a Denial of Service charge. This is because for every request the second company makes of the first company's computer it takes away resources which are needed to handle the customer's requests.
To put this into focus, someone said it is like company A raiding company B's store with cameras, recorders, paper and pencils and interrogating the employees for every single price on every single item. This isn't allowed. But a single employee or manager can go into another store and take notes. It isn't illegal to do that so long as the person doesn't interfere with the normal operations of the store.
To give another example, it is ok to buy a newspaper and read through it to gauge how well your prices are doing versus the competition. But it isn't ok to call up the competition and go through their entire inventory over the phone. Again because you tie up their personel while doing so.
So what should be done? If another company wants to bang away at a given site's information they should pay a service fee to the other company. This service fee could be used to buy a small secondary computer, to hire (or have) someone monitor the system, and an interface (such as a 56K modem or DSL line). The system echos the real computer's transactions and makes them available for transfer. In this way companies which want to gather this information can do so without impacting everyone else. If additional servers are needed, they should be hung off of the sub-server's end of things and not the original server so the updates propagate off across the sub-servers rather than dragging the original server down. After all - who cares if it takes one or two milliseconds to get the information.
Now - knowing the above - why would anyone sue? Because the secondary company (the one who is sucking bandwidth from the server) usually doesn't want to pay for such services. Taken to it's extreme, a company could not function because all of it's resources would be devoted to simply handling these secondary requests. So there is a good reason why they feel they have to sue. It's pretty easy to understand once you get past all of the hype.
Any company has X amount of resources and Y number of customers. If the percentage of Y is reduced due to other companies sucking up all of the resources (X), then the company will go bankrupt. You can't live on air and neither can they. Simple as that.
Ok! Did I hear someone say "But what about search engines?" (I knew I did!) Search engines are not an easy thing to talk about. However, as far as I can tell all of the major search engines obey the robot.txt commands. Ones that don't should have to pay the sites they hit a fee. After all they are doing the same thing as the company in the article - sucking resources.
I don't work for either party involved in the lawsuit or the judge or the lawyers or anyone else involved in this matter.
Just my $0.02 worth. :-)
If you can't go to a web site and extract the information on it for no other use than viewing it on a graphical browser, which is what most web sites are designed for these days, then, it's dead, isn't it?
Now, I agree that the robots.txt file should be respected. It is important to make sure robots don't enter e.g. eternal loops in scripts. I think that those using it to block robots out so robots can't extract useful information are just narrow-minded, and that's their problem, they will die as the market gets a clue (if it ever will). But when the courts decide on topics where they have little understanding prematurely, that's a problem.
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
Yep, good point. So, what eBay is afraid of, is probably that this site shows that eBay sucks...
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
If the web site claims copyright, the user is limited in what they can do with the site's content, whether there's an explicit contract or not.
The ruling seems correct, but for the wrong reason! I cant quote or link to the article I read, but to paraphrase... I seem to recall the original complaint by e-bay was that this service gave consumerA and unfair advantage over consumerB (during open bidding). In that sense (and if the service truly creates an advantage) the ruling would make sense to ME. If, however the precedence is applied to a retail site, and the retailer is allowed to block price comparison checks, then the RETAILER may have an advantage over both consumerA and consumerB. That precedence would suck for all the overworked and underpaid geeks out there!!
The facts expressed here belong to all, the opinions to me. The distinction between fact and opinion is yours to decide.
Instead of a blanket ruling disrupting more than one business plan, the ruling could apply to anyone ignoring the robots.txt is in violation.
Much like a 'no trespassing sign' which also can't be actively enforced, it merely allows those who are about to violate it that legal action can be taken against them.
As it stands now, it looks as though if I want my site metabrowsed because I sell super cheap book in comparison to BN.com I will have to contact each site that is a metabrowser for books and let them know that it is okay to metabrowse my site.
Yuck. That is like asking each and every store you visit if you can come in. A locked door and a closed sign tells me I can't. An open sign and unlocked door tells me it is okay.
This is not the way to build a lasting empire.
However, it's also worth noting that eBay could simply develop anti-bot tools to detect and block (or spoof) known bots. Why not do that, and save the legal bills?
sulli
sulli
RTFJ.
The lawsuit basically makes it illegal to do price comparisons with other sites using a bot, if those sites forbid it. The only ones likely to forbid such a thing are the ones that KNOW that they don't have the best prices. If your prices are truly competitive, then you have nothing to hide.
I'm not a real nerd, I just look, sound, and smell like one.
Multiply by several thousand and you'll get some small idea the amount of business these sites stand to lose by not being indexed. No company -- no matter how large -- wants to lose evenone customer, much less a huge portion of the market like that. They'll all let themselves be indexed, believe me. And if they don't, then screw them -- or more specifically, let them screw themselves.
I use shopper.com to comparison shop all the time, and I don't always buy from the lowest priced vendor. I go for one I can trust as well. I'm sure i'm not the only person who feels that way, and I trust that any company with brains enough to be worthy of my business will see things "my" way, too.
I apologize for repeating an early comment, but, though I have never heard of this being done with Barns and Nobles, it is a common practice for people to do this in other retail environments. They are called brokers and consultants.
Yes, but you could go into the library, make a list of the books contained there, and freely distribute that list without violating any copyrights, this is what a search engine is doing. My public domain argument (public domain is not the correct legal term, as it does have specific implications as to copyright, my apologies for it's use) is specific to public access and trespass, I acknowledged the copyright issue if the metabrowser copies any of the text from the originating site.
That may be true, but endangering someone's business model is not a good basis for setting legal precedents.
Yo dawg, I heard you like the Ackermann function, so OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD
- Let's make a search engine that looks for the highest prices around.
- Give it a nice interface.
- Now, add the possibility to reverse sort the data.
Could they attack you for this?Alternative way:
- Ask for a Chinese cousin to set a low-prices search engine in his country.
- Now, only browse his results and publish them on line.
Will you be sued?Something in Internet is stronger than multinational lawyers: It is international. If you can establish a tax-free copmpany somewhere, you should also be able to set up a web server in a lawyer-free country, shouldn't you ?
--
Trolling using another account since 2005.
A solution for this is similar to one that I heard for cybersquating.
The Problem: If I make a service available on the web through a form(ie Ebay or Mapquest) what stops another person from making their website a simple front end to my engine that pulls out the data with out showing anyone the ads that I use to make money? Nothing(AFAIK)
The Solution: enforce linkage. Make such frontends legal as long as they have a link that says "mined from" or "found on" XYZ web site. this way I would get credit for my engine and the extra front end would provide me with more traffic to my web site.
Again, the courts prove that they do not have any idea the importance of the internet. Someone (name forgotten) recently claimed that the internet is the biggest step in civilization since the industrial revolution. Though you or I may disagree with this, it is certainly important. And now, the very core of what the internet stands for is challenged. Remember when there was NO commerce on the net? Ever since we started buying and selling things over it, the courts have gotten involved and mucked things up. we need a new court system entirely to deal with the internet. Judges that are well versed on the scope and potential should be teh only ones allowed to rule on it. We have special courts for many things (small claims, torts, federal vs. state vs. local issues), why not the internet?
[ob. IANAL]
Are eBay not publishing copyright material? If so where does that leave 'Fair Use', which I would have thought this was.
--
Chernobyl 'not a wildlife haven' - BBC News
On metabrowsing in general-- I feel that a lot of these sites are out for the easy advertising revenue opportunity and have a "take it all and make it ours" type attitude. While these activities are good for the small guy, the industry leaders takes the shaft. However, usually the leader has the advantage of having more products, so the losses are somewhat less severe.
I think the core issue here is requiring that these meta-sites request permission of the companies they select. Or better yet, build a brand and a strategy, and make the companies want to participate. This does work: Pricewatch is a great example. And it's tough to even compete there if you aren't the best price, but companies participate because they know that being on Pricewatch is guaranteed exposure.
Needless to say, you can't go taking bottles of Heinz and Hunt's ketchup and repackage it as MetaKetchup. We need a degree of control, but obviously we want something that won't end up giving up our right to information.
*gel
rwxrwxrwxrwx
How's about we add the last one for Yahoo?
Reminds me of a project idea I had some time ago, similar to price comparison sites in a way:
A 'special' search engine that would take company names and/or product references as the search criteria and display a listing of all the competitors (companies and/or actual products) :)
Examples:
Search: McDonalds; Results: Burger King, KFC, etc...
Search: MS Windows NT; Results: Linux, BSD, BeOS, etc...
Such a tool would not rip the actual content (such as prices) from the different company's sites but instead just keep a list of competitors for every company and product in the market.
I guess the nature of this tool rules out automatic indexers, which makes it more like a directory. However, existing directories like Yahoo! don't directly map competitors at the product reference level.
This would be great for people who need a product but are not familiar with the extisting market. Many times people go with the big names because they don't even know that there are alternatives...
However I see a clear difference between conventional search engine spiders (such as the ones used by Altavista or Lycos) and other spiders used by price comparison sites. Altavista displays listings with the title, URL and brief description of each page, it doesn't rip the contents of the page apart (such as product prices) and reformats the ripped information from different sites. This is surely the main difference between the two indexing methods, the former probably welcomed by e-commerce sites and the other worth the trouble of going to the courts.
This is why I think the robots.txt standard should be revised and allow for the same clear distinction between spiders:
pure indexers, and
content rippers.
This means an e-commerce site can allow a search engine to index most of the pages (this is not only useful to the company selling the product, but also to the consumers who will be exposed to a larger range of choices) and at the same time prevent those unwelcome content rippers.
As a consumer I obviously welcome the idea of price comparison tools which do most of the dirty work, but we must understand the position of the companies. On the other hand, as an internet user (and hardcore web searcher) the last thing I want is for all the companies to ban access to their sites through the robots.txt file, preventing normal search engines from doing their work.
Well, I guess this makes my post redundant... ;)
Next time I'll refresh the page before submitting my 'TookOneHourToWrite' comments
I guess we must put public domain material into perspective when most people's web browsers keep copies of the pages visited in a cache directory. I guess we're not automatically re-displaying the content to 3rd parties but we're all still keeping copies of it.
I hope you agree that everyone who puts material on a web page and misses out the robots.txt is automatically granting access to conventional search engines to index each and every page. Other webmasters may even manually create links to that person's site with a small description or even a site review, unless there is a clear note on the site saying otherwise obviously. If this is not the case then I think we're taking the public domain case too far.
I agree that Ebay is entitled to sue anyone who's breaching their robots.txt file, but I feel that any site without this protection or an explicit copyright advice will not have a case against content rippers.
This whole think reminds me of a meta-search engine called Electric Monk(?). It ripped the search results of Altavista and other search engines and redisplayed the whole content without even paying credit to these sites. I rembember Altavista 'hitting' them hard... haven't heard anything about them for over 2 years. Anyone one knows what happened?
I'm not certain it's really fair to say that there is no legal protection from spam simply because one can't legally say who is allowed to read public documents. Telemarketing and related issues (e.g. UCE) can be considered a form of harrassment. One is free to speak, but that does not mean one can force people to listen to oneself. There are already legal restrictions on telemarketing; there's a good site for info on this, but I've forgotten the address...
As a minor technical point, your statement about public domain as it relates to free access for everyone, is incorrect. Department stores, malls, and other nominally public yet privately owned areas regularly prohibit certain individuals from entering their site. "No Shirt, No Shoes, No Service" ring a bell? Or even more individually, known shoplifters and other troublemakers are routinely warned off individually, and arrested for criminal trespass if they return. I'm not saying this should be an allowable precedent for e-bay's situation, but it's perfectly legal to bar certain individuals from privately held public domain areas.
No relation to Happy Monkey
The judge is wrong. They often are. Ebay invites the public to shop at their site. It is not private. The robot is simply a reporter reporting the news of prices at this public-invited store. This is a freedom of press issue. It may be inconvenient for Ebay to have their prices reported but many things are inconvenient in business. (competitors come to mind.) Furthermore to those that may argue Bidders Edge is a business competitor and as such should not be treated as the press consider e.g. Disney. Owner of ABC News. Disney is in many businesses including gift/collectible stores and is still a member of the press.
"Don't Follow Leaders." Bob Dylan
I think that ebay needs to tighten up its security on the site, just last week ebay asked the federal government to bad a user to its site, he had been kicked off 45 times.. Its not tough to get a user account on ebay, not hard at all. If they want to stop all this, why not make it a bit tougher to get an account, make it so someone cant make an account, get banned, then make another one. Make it so all the auction material is in an area that requires user authentication (when he logs into the site) to get to, so if a search engine were to search the site, it would come up with an error that it was inaccessable. Problem solved. (I am not a developer of web servers, i dont know if this is possible but I dont see why not.)
The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world that he doesn't exist.
But what if I never kept the information? I could run a server-side script every time, or just use an applet. I guess I see why the judge didn't go with the trademark thing- don't I have to be using a trademark to violate it? And lastly, what reason does the judge have to find ebay an argument? Isn't that their job? he should have just thrown it out and seen whether they came back with a decent one. I think tresspass is an OK argument except that ebay gave me as an user permission to use the search engine!
Not necessarily. I submit that most people do not comparison shop. Even those that do, only do it for a few select purchases. I'd guess that 80-90% of a all purchases are made without much thought to price. It's a "I want it now, I'm getting it now" attitude.
Ebay is betting on customer lethargy. People find a service they like, and stick with it. Even if prices go up, they'll keep with it. By blocking meta-browsing by comparison sites, Ebay reduces the risk that shoppers will find those sites and switch, and thus will more likely remain "locked-in" to their service.
ShoutingMan.com
I can't think of a reason why Whyte's ruling is bad. Let the market decide if it wants open or closed auctions.
The "referrer" tag solves the outside linking problem. If a site was concerned about automated searches, it surely wouldn't be that hard to record the number of times it had been accessed from a particular domain and then bounce requests after a certain point. Hell, you might even be able to convince your upstream provider to bounce such requests, as they are at least as annoying as spam.
The world in general, and the U.S. in particular, would be better off if we closed down about half the law schools and used the proceeds to pay for more system administration/network management training. If "judicial restraint" was a phrase with any meaning, the courts whould have ruled that the web wasn't in their jurisdiction a long time ago. Sure, large companies might have hesitated to invest resources in huge sprawling websites at least until the knew what they were doing in a technical sense, but would that really have been a Bad Thing? Lawyers and judges are economically in the same industry however, and expanded jurisdiction means more work for all of them.
Unfortunately, requiring proper user-agent identification 'conflicts' with writing non-agent-specific HTML, in that in this day and age of computer stupidity, neither will happen at the same time. (In regards to the latter, there are sites out there that prevent you from content if you don't have the latest of the big two, so Opera and lynx and whomever else is screwed, because a cgi script does check the referrer field. You can get around this in nearly all of them by modifying it, and 90% of the time, there was no reason for it save for the idiom of forcing the latest browser).
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
Does anyone else think that they will have their work cut out for them?
--
robots.txt should be considered the 'Posted, No Trespassing' sign, really.. ;-P I completely agree..
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
That is *NOT* true at all. A store has the legal right to kick anyone out that they choose. Go ahead and shoplift, see what happens. You'll be banned from the store, and if you go back in and are caught, you sure as hell will be prosecuted for trespassing.
I knew an unfortionate few individuals (Ok, STUPID individuals, but who's counting) who found this out the hard way..
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
A library, yes. Goto Barns and Nobles and try it. See what they end up saying. A library holds up becouse in that particular case, yes, it *IS* a public access institution. A company, brick and morter or electrons, is a different story..
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
Exactly. Those are my sentiments exactly.
This "trespassing" argument is bullshit, and the only reason any judge would rule in favor of it is because he's been misled. Either Bidder's Edge infringed upon Ebay's trademark or they didn't. Period. And if they can't win on that angle, case closed.
ITRW, you can't put up a sign saying "Welcome All! Please Enter and Enjoy" and then prosecute someone for trespassing, regardless of how they behaved once they entered. It doesn't matter if they do it live, or via script, or bot.
Sue them for their behavior, if you can. Try them for crimes they committed. TOS them for heaven's sake. But you can't accuse them of trespassing, because you're a public marketplace! Geezus, what kind of manure did they force-feed the judge to get him to rule like that?
It's like someone who sells inventory lists of all a city's flea markets being convicted of trespassing at a flea market, during its open hours, while researching his list. Absolutely ludicrous.
I can see the fnords!
Ebay's content is NOT in the public domain. It's fairly well established that putting something on a web-page does NOT make it public domain material. You have implicitly granted everyone the right to view your material on the web using ordinary means--but you have NOT given them permission to copy your work and put it up on their own site, or do anything else with it.
With search engines I would argue that the robots.txt spells out your intentions as to how you want your work used by spiders and so forth. It's your material, you have every right to decide how it's used.
I agree with everyone saying that Ebay is being *stupid* by disallowing search engine access: if it was my company, I'd open it up. But it isn't my company, and there is unfortunately no law against stupidity.
It's important to distinguish between what Ebay is legally entitled to do, and what would be intelligent behavior.
Amusing thought: imagine a feature for Gnutilla that found the cheapest price on any music product, using a search job efficiently distributed across all users. (It might also watch for price-fixing patterns on CD prices and report them to the FTC, just to annoy the RIAA).
I would willingly donate cpu cycles and hard drive space in support of an effort of this kind.
Much of the work the FBI does is simple data collection/correlation/analysis. Creating an open, public watchdog project to monitor the behavior of corporations, esp. with respect to price fixing, and put behind it the computational power of the internet, would be an exciting project.
The only downside is see: what happens if someone adopts said software to watch an individual. How does one insure their spare cpu cycles are used ethically?
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
I learned years ago that if you find a site that has gobs of golden info, you mirror it yourself. Why? because it will go away (there are hundreds/thousands of sites that were the cream of the net that now are gone, and all that knowlege is gone too.) Will this ruling make my mirroring illegal? Granted when I run the mirror process it nails the site with a good 30 connections and snags everytidbit it can grab.(I.E. it is easily noticed) What will the law do to me "mr trespasser" who is keeping access to knowlege for personal use? How about my agents? will my agent programs that watch e-bay for certian items become illegal? or how about my slashdot agent, will that someday be frowned upon because it retrieves data in a manner that is not the same as the author intended? and how about trespassing... is it tresspassing if you dont have a fence around it and signs stating to GO AWAY?
this judge is nuts.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Ever heard of cgi?
;-). Some people do not like to "go fetch".
Who says that robots.txt is supposed to be robots.txt?
So the article on yahoo to a certain extent is genuinenly stupid as the architecture for selective metabrowsing is also in place today and I even know people who use it. Not every one is obliged to love lycos ya know
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
Obeying robots.txt is certainly the polite thing to do, and enforcing it may sound like a good legal/political solution, but it isn't a practical solution. You have authorized viewing of any work on your web site if when my client requests a page from your site, your web server provides it. If you don't want my client to receive such-and-such a page, then don't serve it. If you don't want to exchange any packets with my client, then drop them on the floor as you receive them.
Sure, this is more complicated than robots.txt, but you will never effectively be able to police the entire world for the authorized use of deep linking and/or indexing. Ultimately, the power to prevent this problem rests on the server, not on the client or the search engine.
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
The value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of nodes. If you double the number of nodes in network, the number of possible connections (and hence the value) quadruples.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
Thats a good point. The problem is that sometimes the thing I want to buy isn't the cheapest one. I've been using pricewatch.com for years, and the items are listed ascending by price. The top few records are almost invariably complete crap. Sometimes I need to pay higher prices in exchange for the ability to have that hard drive on my desk in 18 hours. If that larger company didn't want to be indexed by pricewatch, I would be screwed.
-B
Yes, except that you can buy pens and notebooks at stores other than Office Depot and Office Max. Also, we had a price matching policy with any competitor, and people called us on it all the time.
-B
I disagree. Anyone should be withing their rights to say their site is "unspiderable" by personal as well as coperate spiders. They should specify this in their copyright notice and spiders.txt, and it should be enforced by law. It's the sites own loss if they do so, as yahoo auctions will probably allow spiders, and thus be quicker to shop.
Likewise, if a store wishes to only reveal prices when the item is bought, like some jewlery stores or some auto shops (due to complicated pricing) they are allowed to. And best of luck to them, competing against stores who WILL publish their prices up front, searchably, on the internet.
-Ben
As an E-Bay seller, I cannot imagine under any circumstance how it would hurt my auction to be seen by MORE people than it would otherwise. If you go to any trouble at all to make your auction look good, you don't care if you compete with 100 or ten thousand other auctions selling the same thing...
I really think E-Bay is stupid to push the searchers to smaller more widespread searches, it's going to make a lot more traffic than if there were just a few really large auction search sites.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Actually i think a better analagy would be letting actual robots into your store. I dont know about you but i wouldnt want big 500 kilo robots stomping around, their red robotic eyes clicking and whirring, scaring the customers, ruining the carpet.
No sir, call me robotist but i would put a big sign up saying 'no robots' right next to where it says 'no dogs' and 'no skateboarding'.
Here's an interesting twist on this. You have a web page with copyrighted material. You've got a "robots.txt" which controls access to robots and says not to scan the page. If a robot circumvents this access control device (either by not reading it or by ignoring it), is this a DMCA violation?
The legality of a "semi transparent layer" is questionable. Some time ago, I searched for pages linking to my web page, out of curiosity. I was horrified to see one company (whose name currently escapes me) devote a page of their site to my site, with advertisements and linkage to what they thought were "related" sites, but were really just URL's of their business partners. They did this for untold thousands of sites, most likely just leeched from places like AltaVista and Yahoo!.
Oh, and by the way, they _did_ link to my site, but it appeared in a miniscule JavaScript pop-up window. I hope they got sued out of existence.
For more information, click here.
i worked at best buy a few years ago for a while (as a technician, whoo-hoo $7.20/hr!) and this practice is very common and not at all looked down upon. it's also common to grab the other stores' weekly magazine ads (mini-catalogues almost, you know the ones) and adjust the prices for the week to match (if needed)..
this is completely ridiculous and should be shot down, it's another example of would-be monopolists trying to manipulate the law to insure they have no competition.
to the person who said 'allow e-bay to win, the smarter companies will be open,' this is possible, but look how long it is taking for linux to surplant M$,.. well-known, familiar brands, products, services stick around because most people don't want to do spend the effort to investigate something new, and they feel safe with what they know (even if they are shown/told how evil and bad it is.)
anyway, whatever,... rant off.
...dave
Think different? I'd be happy if most people would just think...
It will be the dominant or best known players in these games who want to block the meta-searcher/meta-browser. If there are a lot of small players, customers will turn to a meta-search to find results if there is one that does a good job of aggregating the data. The small players win by being found through the meta-search. If eBay chooses to be outside a meta-search, but the meta-search still covers more than eBay, then customers will probably move away from eBay to the meta-searcher. If ebay is bigger, then customers will go there rather than the meata-search.
If sites that do not want to be meta-listed in some way can opt out, then it is possible that market forces will reward or punish them according to the quality of the service they provide in comparison to the cloud of meta-listed sites rather than just any individual site.
I recall a recent case where a company (sorry, I'm forgetting the parties involved) was sued for "deep linking" into another's site thus bypassing the front page with ads. The courts as I recall ruled that deep liking was legal.
I've been thinking what the differences are between Deep Linking and Metabrowsing. One difference I can come up with offhand is with deep linking and metabrowsing would be dynamic content. If web pages are based on an inventory which and are generated throgh CGI scripts, then and external use of that program might be considred more tresspassing than a hard coded web page. In the law suit cases (and regarding bots) you actually need the other server to generate the information and retrieve the content to be displayed on the web page as opposed to data they freely post.
It's a superficial difference as both require use of the server, but I'm working on figuring this out, and cof course I could be wrong on just about everything. Any ideas?
Being with you, it's just one epiphany after another
and what is Metcalf's Law of networks?
Are you referring to every single bleepin Special Interest Group USENET group, regardless of niche topic being littered with links to relevant Ebay auctions?
I can't go into rec.games.video.classic without seeing 99% of the postings begin with FA: ENDS IN 3 HOURS!
ok, I buy that analogy (erm, or is just a rebadged analogy from somewhere else?).
What is the legality of that, anyway? I know AMG modify mercs, but they never let people think they are buying an AMG (even when they modify it so much it has to be recertified as roadworthy).
I am allowed to slap any logo I want to on a car, but can I sell it w/o disclosing the fact that it was only a rebadged beemer? I think so.
But to keep up the analogy accurate, the beemer would have to be free, and BMW make their money by the purchaser entering the showroom.
If I go into the showroom and snag a bunch of cars to rebadge, sure, I am depriving them of income. So their response is just to stop admitting me. They have that right.
It should be easy enough for e-bay to recognise and ignore these robots, w/o needing to drag the courts into it. The courts only work in one justisticion, which is lucridously (and lucratively) easy to work around in this case.
reference, please?
'cause that makes no sense
I note that ebay hasn't posted a www.ebay.com/robots.txt file.
Apropos of nothing, but interesting nonetheless.
Since robots.txt expresses the site's intent regarding robotic processing of the site's content, perhaps J. Random Friend of the Court should bring this up with the judge.
Bidder's Edge might bring it up also, if it must defend against claims for damages from their previous work.
I agree completely that, if the courts DO end up creating/recognizing some kind of proprietary right against robotic extraction of site content, assertion of that right should require posting of a standardized, robot-readable "no tresspassing" sign, and the assumption in the absence of the sign should be that the intent was not to assert such a right.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
It does have one - http://cgi.ebay.com/robots.txt
And (as another poster pointed out) others on search.ebay.com and listings.ebay.com.
Guess I should have looked more deeply. Thanks for the correction.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Forget all these department store analogies.
The issue is reselling. By gathering up eBay's content, and manipulating it to display on your own site, you are in violation of copyright.
If on the other hand, you simply "wrap" ebay's content with your own (i.e put ebay in a frame under your own site) that shouldn't apply, (a la public domain).
This seems to make the issue seem a lot more like the iCraveTV controvery. For those that don't remember, iCraveTV was re-broadcasting TV channels. Their argument was that the signals were PD, and they were not being changed.
It seems that these forms of meta-browsing would be analogous of re-broadcasting an edited TV signal (remove ads etc.)
Under this light, it doesn't seem quite like "Free advertising for eBay" anymore.
> The judge didn't buy eBay's argument that
> Bidder's Edge was guilty of trademark
> infringement. He instead focused on the claim
> that Bidder's Edge's searches essentially
> constituted a form of trespassing on eBay's
> property.
I dont quite understand how searching a site (even if through a web crawler) could be trespassing... A site (I *thought*) was put up as public information (unless the author made arrangements to protect that information).
Anyone care to enlighten me?
Ebay wants their property to be a site, not a clearinghouse for information for their competitors. Ebay doesn't just make money by listing sales, but by retaining eyeballs in their system. If someone is able to data-mine their site and have all of their listings in another system, then they are losing half of their business model. Ebay doesn't want to be that clearinghouse of information. They want their listings to be their alone, and to be the only ones that can mine their data.
I don't think that's entirely accurate either. After all, said customer would still have to buy those products from your competitor... which sounds to me like free advertising for your competitor.
I don't see the real big problem here. I mean, if eBay, etc want to stop their site from being indexed in price indexes (which is what I assume this is all about), it seems to me that they're only hurting themselves... the only motive for retail sites to try and block this metabrowsing stuff is if they have a substantial markup on merchandise that smaller ma-and-pop type can easily beat and they don't want the public to know. They only want Joe Blow to know *their* prices and *their* sales.
Yes, it's fair to say that this doesn't give the average use quite as much freedom, but I blame that partly on the ignorance of said average user.
I, for one, believe that voluntary price listing sites (ie Pricewatch) will always be around and will always be the best deal for the consumer. Why? Well because the companies that participate are doing so because they *want* the world to know their prices and aren't afraid to challenge each other. I believe it's called capitalism .
Take me, for example. I recently built a computer that cost me a total of around $3500. Nearly every compontent was bought from a retailer that advertised their products on pricewatch. I would estimate that if I had gone the more "traditional" route and done my own hunt-and-search for retail prices I would have only covered a tiny fraction of the kind of sites listed on pricewatch and thus it's very feasible that I could have paid in excess of $5000 total for the complete system. Most of the components I bought through pricewatch listees cost around 50%-75% of the recommended retail price, which is what most retail stores adhere to.
This may sound like some kind of blatant Pricewatch plug, so you're free to flame just go ahead and do your research before you do. Hell, even compare pricewatch to some other sites, maybe you could educate me. I'm just stating my experience with e-commerce thus far.
I spent over 20years in the grocery business. It is common practice to check the prices of your competitors. You walk into there store and check a few key prices and then put up comparisons in your own store.
Consumer advocates do the same thing in "real-world walk-in" retail establishments. They walk in and explore the *public* areas of the store. COULD the owners kick these people out? sure they could. In fact I was asked to leave one day while checking prices. Kinda stupid thing to do though don't ya think...
A retail outlet allows public access. it's the nature of the business. I'm sure it would be difficult for Safeway or Alertsons, etc to go to court and make a case for suing the competitors for trespass when they allow access to the general public.
IMHO when you put up an e-commerce site, you're opening up a retail outlet with a public area for shopping. The reason e-commerce is whinning is because it's just simply easier and more efficient to compare prices with a computer. I say boo-hoo, and please don't clog the courts with this kind of BS.
> But what happens if I am keeping an eye on an
> specific item and bookmark it so I can jump
> straight to it? huh?
That case could be handled as a special case. No Referer is different from a referer to another host outside of ebay.
Since most clients arn't hacked to allow people to forge referers, that would effectivly make the service useless.
> there are robots.txt files but they are being
> ignored,
As was pointed out numerous times, there are robots.txt, they do NOT stop indexing of most of the site. The main site has no robots.txt (I checked myself even). ALL they stop is indexing of certain dirs.
Secondly...if they are acting bad...then ban their robot. Redirect anything comming from its IP into lower elbonia. If a robot is acting poorly...then block it. Simple as that.
> which in all fairness is not right.
I only partially agree. Look, you either make available for public consumption, or you don't. You either make it world veiwable, or you don't.
It is a technical impossibility to block "robots" and not users, since the two are the same as far as the protocol is concerned. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
I look at robots.txt as a nice way to steer robots away from cgis and things that are not condusive to robotic checking. (afterall CGIs and stuff are useless to index usually).
I look at it as a curtesy to the people running the robot to tell them what they should avoid, rather than as a set of rules for where I don't want them to go (because thats impossible to enforce anyway).
Bottom line: If you don't want them to go there, you can stop them. You can't stop them AND allow the public at large to browse freely and without authentication. (like logins)
Seriously, all these people are doing is making it easier for ebay customers and the customers of other sites to shop and auction.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
> Frankly I agree that if eBay has spent time and
> money creating a world class brand, it is wrong
> for anyone who can write a Perl script to be
> able to steal their customers especially when
> some of these are paying customers
Well why?
IF ebay stuff gets listed on this, then people who bid on it are STILL bidding through ebay...so ebay and its sellers are STILL profitting.
ALL this is doing is listing them alongside other auctions and stuff. It lets consumers comparison shop a little more between ebay and other sites.
It would be like I sent people out to a buch of stores in the area and compiled all their prices and made a listin gfor people so they could goto the store with the lowest price.
If ebay doesn't like it...why not stop it? Can't they figure out how to make a robots.txt? Then if the robots.txt isn't obeyed, just see where the indexer is comming from and block it at the boarder router...its not that hard.
Better yet...redirect all pages that have someone outside as a referer. Its not like they are powerless to stop it and they need the courts to help them. Either they just want to be pricks about it, or they are incompetent at running their own systems.
-Steve
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
If you allow the public free access to your property, it essencially becomes public domain
No. You are completely wrong, and this muddle-headed thinking amongst geeks is what gives Slashdot a bad name. I can go to a library and read a book. I can't however copy out that same book, and claim it as my own work. I can't even copy it out, put the original author's name on the front, and open my own lending library with it. Please go and learn something about copyright before pontificating about it (and the moderators shoudl be more careful too).
In practice, an awful lot of what you describe has gone on in the past. This is "Posession is the law", applied to IP rights. In law though, we can't do this. As money gets more and more interested in the Web, we'll find that this gets stamped upon.
"I say that unless you use HTTP authentication or another form of validation.. anything you put on a webpage is public-accessible, copyright be damned. It is simply an unreasonable burden to ask otherwise."
:)
I disagree. You can put stuff on a web page, and still maintain effective copyright.
Copyright law is about who maintains distribution rights to a piece of IP. If you put an essay or whatever on your website, and have copyright, all you are effectively saying is that 'here, I'm distributing this for no charge, have a copy'. Which is, as you say, anything you put on a webpage is publicly accessible. Duh!
As a consumer of the IP, you are allowed to make as many copies of the material you want (in your disk cache, mem cache, etc...) provided you do not distribute them to others.
However, this does _not_ mean that anyone else can redistribute your work, as you are the only person who can distribute it, being the copyright holder. Hence linking to any page on the web should be fine, as you're telling people where publically accessible information is, and they're getting a copy from the originating server, as per the copyright holders wishes. But copying a page on to your site and having it open to the public is not legal, as you are distribuiting material that you have no right to, which would seem logical to me. I can't put New York Times articles on my site as I am not allowed to redistribute them. And I'm certainly not allowed to modify them and redistribute them (like changing the byline to read me
It would leave caching search engines in trouble, but that's what robots.txt is for.
The other thing, which it is important to note, is that although copyright does protect IP, it does not protect _facts_. So a robot that crawls sites (such as auction sites), _even if it ignores robots.txt_ should be allowed, under existing copyright law, to 'read' the sites, distill whatever facts it wants (such as item prices) from those pages and generate new copyright protected pages with those facts on.
Seems to me that existing copyright law works fine to me (although IANAL) if its interpreted as its spirit was intended.
Copyright is good.
Why doesn't the gene pool have a life guard?
That's an insightful remark. It makes you think about the political, legal, and social implications of client vs server side processing.
We hear a lot of talk about "agents", but most of the turn out to be some kind of advertising system. But an agent that really worked for you (and probably came as part of a product you paid for) could be useful.
Today, we're seeing things done on the server that ought to be on the client because it's so easy to deploy a product as a web page. For example, shopping carts ought to be local, not on the web site. Clicking on "add to cart" should put the info in a cart on the client, independent of what site you're shopping from. A background task could comparison shop for better prices while you continue to select items. Payment should interact with your home bookkeeping system, with a digitally signed transaction for a fixed number of dollars, not a raw credit card number, going to the merchant site. It's probably too late for this to be the standard for B2C e-commerce, but B2B e-commerce has to work that way so accounting will work.
Amusing thought: imagine a feature for Gnutilla that found the cheapest price on any music product, using a search job efficiently distributed across all users. (It might also watch for price-fixing patterns on CD prices and report them to the FTC, just to annoy the RIAA).
...is the banner impressions. Many online stores depend on revenue from banners and TroubleClick data to keep their overhead down.
<O
( \
Will I retire or break 10K?
What you talk about takes time. You don't really have people covering a large area, and the information is not immediately accessible to everyone. On the other hand, I could very easily see someone making a rather large price-comparison resource, that could be global, and would be accessible to anyone with a web browser.
I think metabrowsing for the lowest price can be nothing but good to the consumer, but I can easily see businesses not liking the liquidity of the market. I could also see businesses going.. well.. out of business from instant price comparisons of everyone, everywhere. There are businesses that stay alive because of their geography, and I can see them being real vulnerable.
On a completely unrelated point; companies forcing search engines to pay to index their sites? Are you serious? "Yes, that's right, unless you pay us X dollars, we're going to make ourselves less visible to the customers that pay us." I think blocking metabrowsing is bad, true, but honestly, it's not the end of the world.
You can go to the mall or a store that's entirely open to the public, and the owners are still within thier rights to kick you out.
If you stay at a store for three or four hours run around, bother the salesmen, knock over displays (and most importantly) with no intention of buying anything, you will be asked to leave. Once that's been done you are trespassing.
A buddy of mine started watching Austin Powers at the video store, almost saw the whole thing, but after an hour and fifteen minutes of doing nothing but look at the monitor with no intention of spending money, he was asked to leave.
He left, he didn't start yelling about how it was a public place or 'Why do you show movies if you don't want people watching them?'
- My password is slashdot
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
Right, which is fine.. that is the stores internal policy, again the comparison can be made to robots.txt. The big difference here is that Walmart could not charge me under the law. In fact, it is probably not legal for them to confiscate my property.
:-)
Of course, the standard IANAL applies here
Bullshit. The "bricks and mortar" part of the operation I work for has a "hall of shame" - pictures of about 80 people who have been banned from the store for shoplifting or other disruptive activity. If someone comes in and breaks the law we have every right to tell them not to come back.
As far as I'm concerned, these people were first politely asked to discontinue their activities. When they did not comply, thats when Ebay got tough with them.
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
The link to this article says "controversy", but the article itself holds that this ruling will be bad for consumers. I'm not so sure. If a business is willing to spend the money on coders, servers, reviewers, etc to design a really good system to help you find what you need, it could be driven out of business when everyone uses it's search and review functions to find out what they want, and then go to to a crawler or shopbot to actually buy the good or service. And notice that by saying that crawling a site is trespassing, sites can decide who to "invite" in, including search engines. On the whole it seems like a good ruling for now. It can, and will be, revisited anyway.
I don't think the loss of sites offering meta-browsing (for example, culling stories from a variety of newspapers)is necessarily a big deal. It's always possible to create that capability at the client end browser (although it's possible to screw even that up as well: the lamebrains in Redmond made IE pay attention to robots.txt when crawling a site, which makes it useless for creating personal collections, IMO.) The real loss will be to the generation of databases of data that would be too time-consuming or difficult for an individual to do. Search engines like Google could (theoretically) be barred from sites that didn't want them intruding (although, that capability would seemingly be available already in robots.txt - just set it to "don't index anything.")
:-)
Here's a random, probably impractical, thought: the search engines could agree on what indexing policy ecommerce sites should allow, and boycott those that won't agree. The boycott could take the form of putting a normally-off checkbox next to the search button, saying "check this if you also want to search for sites run by evil corporate bastards." Just a fantasy
I guess my point here is where is the transition to illegality?
...
If I were EBay's attorney, I'd argue that you were infringing EBay's copyright when you let your friends access your compilation of EBay's information. Interestingly, the article didn't list this as one of the causes of action in the lawsuit. Instead, EBay contended trademark infringement. And even that didn't fly - instead, the judge found some oddball theory of trespass. Of the 3, the last one is shakiest, IMO. Guess I just don't have a legal mind
It's not really stealing their customers to make info available about what's being sold. Customers still must go to EBay in order to buy. How is spidering EBay auctions different from strolling through your supermarket aisle, noting the prices, and then posting them to a web page?
So what's the problem?
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Do ya feel happy-go-lucky, punk?
I agree 100% with robots.txt and that all spiders should obey it...
But to me, metabrowsing and spidering for search engines are very very different.
Search Engines although do spider a site only do it once every few months if that and direct the user to your page to get your content. This is a plus for you.
Now if a metabrowser spiders your site a few times a day, you are taking bandwidth and processor hits multiple times.. and your content is being used out of context on another site, where they get the use of your content and the viewer and you get squat..
As I said.. I agree with using robots.txt, but you should be able (as you can) to bar certain unwanted spiders from your site and your content..
btw. what is Priceman.com ?? (taken to court by MySimon) Their main page is password protected...
Is there a law against this? If WalMart wants to sell pencils for $20, shouldn't it be allowed to?
If WalMart wants to sell pencils for $20, that is their right, but the existing situation is more akin to WalMart suing someone for telling a third party about WalMart's terrible deal on pencils.
eudas
Blessed is he who expects the worst, for he shall not be disappointed.
actually, department stores can and do decide which specific individuals are to be treated as trespassers. these individuals may include, but are not limited to: people taking photos, people eating or drinking in violation of posted signs, people behaving in ways which disturb other customers, people who are suspected of shoplifting, and natalie portman fanatics on a rampage.
the only way the department store will be "in trouble" is if they are in violation of either common sense or local/state/federal discrimination laws. i agree with you, however, that ebay has ways of making their case a lot more secure. for starters, they could deny access from IP addresses which appear to be browsing large numbers of unrelated auctions and/or have been verified as the addresses of those who are reusing auction info for Nefarious Purposes.
frankly, i think all of these lawsuits are just a way to get cheap advertising that doesn't look like advertising. it keeps the company's or band's moniker in the public eye/ear just a little bit longer at way less cost than airtime. and it doesn't look like an ad, which means that the unwitting consumer is more likely NOT to gloss it over.
I do not have a signature
Actually people do this all the time, they are usually called brokers or consultants. A broker will usually buy the product from you directly, where as a consultant usually sends the customer directly to you, just like a search engine.
yea, the article can >:D
I wrote my own robot to crawl ebay and collect data for personal use? Does that make my tool illegal?
Time does not wait.
Actually, I like that slashdot does the slashdot.xml - don't fight 'em, join 'em! Of course, if you're not making a profit like *cough* *cough* priceline *cough* ebay *cough*, then you're going to want to get all the ad eyeballs you can.
*Ahem*. Time to take that cough medication.
I wonder if eBay is also suing AuctionWatch?
Auctionwatch compiles information from eBay, Yahoo, and some other ones I think.
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So the search engines get moved offshore, out of reach of meddling government.
More power to us, less to them.
Why do companies resort to the law courts the minute a challenge to their business plan appears?
In the old days, you cut your price, bettered your service or advertised more...
What next? Ford sueing GM because the new GM Spankit targets the Ford Flubber's market?
When I were your age, all round here were fields...
More seriously .. I say if you put a service on the internet, it is world-accessible. There is no way anyone can realistically be expected to see every legal mumbo-jumbo on each and every page they surf. It is an unreasonable burden to place on the viewer as there is no way of determining the validity of the "contract" (you don't even know what country it's in!).
I say that unless you use HTTP authentication or another form of validation.. anything you put on a webpage is public-accessible, copyright be damned. It is simply an unreasonable burden to ask otherwise.
If Ebay doesn't want to send traffic to a particular client, they are welcome to blackhole that client. robots.txt is a good convention and I would be unhappy if someone didn't follow it on my site, but still the ultimate responsibility for providing the content lies with the server. I don't see how you can call it copyright infringement if your server provides the information to anyone who asks for it. You were giving it away; they didn't steal it.
Republishing that information might be a little iffier; it depends on whether the collection of information as republished is significantly different. You can't copyright a collection of facts (IIRC) but you can copyright the organization/presentation of those facts.
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
Doesn't Apple's Sherlock 2 program do basically the same thing? It can give you a listing of any eBay auction sorted by whatever you want in Apple's own little interface. I assume they get this by crawling eBay's site, and there arn't any of eBay's adds displayed while you're doing it.
If this fails the appeal, would Apple have to remove this feature as well?
I doubt they would want to do that. Maybe some big money muscle could turn this thing around easier.
http://kered.org
But, if the Bidder's Edge metabrowsing is held illegal, then using a personal robot agent to go out and collect and summarize information is illegal. This will be an even greater loss to all of us in the future.
agreed.
we always seem to be saying that if you don't like something, do something about it (and suing is not considering doing something about it).
the infrastructure and technology are in place to actually fix most problems or dispute most problems such as these.
if a site does not want to be linked, then I think they have a right, through the use of robot.txt, to prevent crawling of their site. but at the same time, I think that unrestricted linking is necessary.
the fact is that the web grows and sites prosper from being open. allowing others to link to their site increases their brandname and draws more traffic to their products. but if they choose to be a standalone entity, that is also their choice.
if I remember correctly, there was a great article a while back on how the internet was growing in a bowtie like shape. also, most internet developers and marketers recognize the fact that being open leads to more users and longer amount of time. trapping users in your site doesn't amount to more time, it leads to more people leaving.
let ebay win this battle. the smarter companies will continue to be open.
Courts don't understand Metcalf's Law of networks. Most people don't get it. They don't understand how eBay's actions harm the entire web. It is sad actually.
John S. Rhodes
WebWord.com Usability Vortal
How to Download YouTube Videos
I want to upgrade a 3 year old tower that requires very non-standard RAM. Ordering direct from a vendor or manufacturer would cost about $200. Searches on meta-store engines didn't do much better. When I checked most auction sites and meta-auction engines, I got zero hits. The sellers just aren't there.
But at eBay, I find a half-dozen new listings of them every goddam week, selling around $130. All of the other sites put together can't touch eBay's volume of sellers.
So what would eBay have to gain from allowing meta engines to spider them? Nothing! They dominate the auction market. If you really want to find something at the lowest price, you have to include eBay in your search. And if you already have to go to eBay, why bother with the meta engines or the other smaller auction sites at all?
Simple ruthless competition. Remind you of any monopoly that we know?I believe that most stores still have an unoffical policy of "running out" price checkers. I have heard (but I have not seen) that some price checkers go complete James Bond with spy cameras and disguises and everything to avoid being ousted.
"The man with the golden price gun"??
"Live and let me have 10% off the competitors"?
"For your sale prices only"?
"In Sam Walton's secret service"?
(Ok, thats probably enough of that).
But anyway, that sounds like a damn cool job to me!!!
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Same thing later in the article:
So some sites might now play? WHO CARES?! They're the ones who won't get referrals from AlataVista and co. For the rest of us, there's plenty of other content to be had.The simple fact is that comparison bots, search engines and the like are providing a free service to the commerce sites, in the form of customer referrals. If some sites want to cut off their own noses, then let 'em.
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One hundred and twenty chars!
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Although not much sense. How can you trespass into a server that accepts anonymous connections via port 80 anyway? I agree there is some kind of claim here, but ebay should have had a harder time backing it up in the courtroom than calling it trespassing.
And do the implications of this apply only to competing sites that want to outdo each other (since they're more likely to go to court), or also to more intermediate sites like cnet?
Of course these companies could just hire some interns, monkeys, high school community service volunteers, etc. to go to a bunch of sites, find out the prices, and update the site every few hours or days.
# debian/rules
I'm well aware the consistent Slashdot stance against big business or corporations of any kind, but at the risk of flames, I must say I agree with Ebay et al.
.txt file that they would post on their servers and these .txt files would determine whether or not a spider bot was allowed to scan and access files on the site. Perhaps a case can be made if there were no such .txt, but I'm definitely sure that a large site like Ebay would have one, making it a clear case of copyright violation. Personally, this Bidders Edge site reminds me of the napster site: it bases its business distributing the copyrighted works of other established firms without permission.
If I remember it correctly, most large websites had a
I realize that freedom is important, but should the internet be allowed to kill courtesy of any sorts? If Ebay doesnt want spiders scanning them, aren't they in their right to take legal action? After all, Ebay isn't a faceless corporation: big surprise, it is made up of people like you and me... only these people worked their way to a profitable business. Asking for a little professionalism isnt trying to control the market, its just protecting one's rights.
Freedom of speech is important, yes, but remember that freedom can be revoked when it threatens and infringes on the rights of others.
eBay is being stupid. They want to sell a service. So why are they shutting down people who sell their service?
Pretend that I am a vacuum cleaner salesman. Also pretend that Linus Torvalds is telling his friends that they can buy vacuum cleaners from me. He doesn't have my permission to tell his friends.
What's rational:
1) Let Linus alone, because his friends are buying my vacuum cleaners
or:
2) Sue the hell out of Linus, because he's passing out stacks of MY BUSINESS CARDS THAT I SPENT A LONG TIME DESIGNING DAMMIT!
As I said, eBay is being stupid.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
It exists today - its called hosts.deny.
NO ONE has a right to search your website. If you make it accessible then they can, but every server admin has the right to arbitrarily deny connections. If I want I can stopper everything from *.yahoo.com or *.googlebot.com or even *.uk. We don't need a law to enforce this, it exists at present.
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If things like this get upheld, I think the future of auction searches will be pushed down to the client level - imagine an applet doing the search, or something as simple as many frames opening up with searches from each auction site. All of those come from the client so there could be no claims of the server tresspassing...
You could even develop a simple standalone app that had plugins for various sites you wanted to do price searches on, and let the users download the plugins. The great part (and this is where the money comes in) is that if it became popular to use, you could actually blackmail the various auction sites into paying you to cache some search results on your own server that the plugins would go to first, so they get less traffic!
Then you're right back where we are now, but E-Bay is paying you for the same searches they are currently trying to stop.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It's also legal for stores to refuse entry to people. If the stores don't want to be price checked, and they know that a particular person is a price checker, they can refuse that person entry into the store. And if that person enters after being told that he/she was not welcome, they can charge him/her with tresspassing. That's the parallel the judge has made. eBay told a specific individual (a corporate entity in this case) that they were not welcome on eBay's property (the computers). They entered anyway and were charged with tresspassing.
This reminds me of a saying common in the early days of the [Use]Net, "Freedom of the press belongs to them as owns one". It was all about the rights of systems administrators and the owners of networked computers to control absolutely the use that was made of their processors and storage space. No one has a right, the philosophy held, to propogation of their articles. It was a privilege and a favour extended by systems administrators, who would devote some of their valuable processor time and storage space to the public good by propogating the articles. And if they said "no" to you or to your article: tough beans, it's their computer.
It seems to me that eBay is making the same sort of argument. People don't have a "right", they say, to use the servers that belong to eBay. It is a privilege that they make generally available and can revoke at will. If you disagree with eBay, you are in the position of saying that at some point privately owned computers become "public property" in that the owners do not have final say over what they are used for and how. Where is the line drawn?
It also reminds me of the legal controversy over "deep linking", with some companies (for example, Ticketmaster, named in the article) protesting those who would link deep into their site, rather than to their home page. This would allow those following the link to bypass all of the upper level ads and get right to the material they wanted. They claimed that these links were a violation of their property rights, too.
Myself, I'd draw the line somewhere betwen the two positions. Much as I support the free flow of information around the Internet, I find myself forced to agree with eBay that their computers belong to them and they should be allowed to refuse entry to whomsoever they want. I don't buy the argument that once something is available on the Internet it must be available to everybody. I think Exranets and password protected sites are OK.
On the other hand, I'd disagree with Ticketmaster. They don't have the right to control the links on someone else's pages on someone else's server. That's someone else's property.
YMMV, of course.
Respectfully, David Tallan
I'd call that unacceptable business practice.
OK, now I give the program to my friends, because they like it. What's changed? Now I distribute it free off my web page. Is it still OK? What about the fact that I get ad revenue on my page from the people downloading it? What if I had just sold it to my friends to begin with (only a few people...maybe 5 or 10)? So now what if I convert it to a web search engine that people can use to freely search auction sites? Now I'm getting more add revenue, but so what? What if I sell the program or the service?
I guess my point here is where is the transition to illegality? In trdaitional trespassing law, it is when I step onto the property without permission. But ebay gave me permission to use the site. Where did I lose it? (If we allow that I did lose it when I began running a large commercial web site...)
You guys might not like this, but I think the reasonable answer is that "robots.txt" should be obeyed. robots.txt is the file you can put on your website telling spiders which areas they should or should not access.
If you put up a robots.txt that forbids spidering your site, and someone spiders it, I think you are well within your rights to claim that that amounts to copyright infringement: a use of your work which you did not authorize (not even implicitly).
But you're a hypocrit and should get no help from the courts, in my opinion, if you allow search engines into your sites (open robots.txt) but you somehow claim your competitor is infringing your copyright when they index you with a metabrowser.
If you don't want to be metabrowsed then you ought to accept that you can't be spidered by search engines either--all or nothing, you ought not to pick and choose who can or cannot spider you.
I used to work at an Office Depot that was about a block away from an Office Max. There wasn't anything secret about our secret shoppers. The Office Max people would wave at us when we wrote down their prices and we would say "hi" when they came to our place. It's a good comparison but I think it's a little off. Ebay wasn't pissed that they had high prices, they don't even set the prices of the items sold there. They just didn't want to share the market with anyone. If you wanted to look up a web auction, they wanted you to go to Ebay.com, and Ebay only. Bidder's Edge was allowing people to find auction sites they had never heard of, and Ebay (with it's huge mindshare) didn't like it.
-B
"The judge didn't buy eBay's argument that Bidder's Edge was guilty of trademark infringement. He instead focused on the claim that Bidder's Edge's searches essentially constituted a form of trespassing on eBay's property. "
And the funny part is, if I shot this judge, *I* would go to jail.
Has he never heard of "secret shoppers"? These are people that go into a store pretending to shop but instead write down prices. Then they go back to the original store and advice pricing policy. How is that different?
Better yet, how about I visit Office Max, Office Depot, etc and write down their prices for Palm Pilots. Then I compile all this info and put it on a website. Tresspass? You moron!
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Here's eBay's robot.txt
Available at http://search.ebay.com/robots.txt and http://listings.ebay.com/robots.txt
It seems they disallow all indexing of any sort on their search site but there is no robots.txt for the main site or on the eBay pages sites.
Frankly I agree that if eBay has spent time and money creating a world class brand, it is wrong for anyone who can write a Perl script to be able to steal their customers especially when some of these are paying customers (people pay eBay to have their auctions highlighted and so on).
The article mentions that the courts are trying to force "old world rules" onto the internet, and that is part of why this happened.
But the last time I checked, it was fully legal to shop around for the best price. In fact, AFAIK it is legal to pay someone to shop for the best price for you. And lastly, if I was inclined to take notes on prices in different stores and make them publicly available, could I be charged?
This is wierd if you ask me, don't the judges realize that search engines are doing more or less the same thing?
OTOH, there was a post above that mentioned the robots.txt file - and I must say I agree with that, anything searching a site should be obeying that file. This is akin to a store keeping it's records locked up, or knowing about an upcoming sale and not broadcasting it the week before.