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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.
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
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.
Absolutely agree. HTML is designed for linking, and in general, if you've placed something up without placing a robots.txt in the same directory, it should be fair game for indexing.
Also, technical solutions already exist, and if used properly are more effective and less costly than litigation. Simply require that there be a valid "Referrer:" header before serving up the information -- sure, the indexer can easily provide a fake header, but anyone who tries to follow the link from an outside site is simply SOL. It's sufficient to serve a static page stating that those links will be accessible only from within the site.
Of course, the lawyers won't like any solution that cuts them out of the picture.
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"Go Metallica. Die RIAA." -- Linus Torvalds
Think long term, from eBay's perspective. Right now, they're the best known internet auction site, by a wide margin. If someone wants to buy or sell via an auction mechanism, there's a good chance they'll go to eBay.
But what happens if comparison sites like Bidder's Edge become popular? Then people go to Bidder's Edge first when they're looking to buy something, dramatically increasing the likelihood that they'll end up somewhere other than eBay - on a comparison shopping site, eBay won't stand out nearly so much as it does in, say, popular media. So yeah, while having their auctions listed on Bidder's Edge may provide eBay with some short-term benefit, in the long term, it diminishes the value of eBay's name recognition.
So what eBay wants to do is to kill sites like Bidder's Edge before they get off the ground. How to do that? By keeping their own listings out of Bidder's Edge. Since eBay is by far the biggest and best-known online auction house, being unable to list eBay acutions dramatically decreases the usefulness of Bidder's Edge. So people won't go there, and the site never develops a following.
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.