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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.
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
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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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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.
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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.