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.

Comments

robots.txt should be obeyed

[trance9]

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.

Re:robots.txt should be obeyed

[davonds]

Your missing several points, first is the concept of public domain. If you allow the public free access to your property, it essencially becomes public domain. IE: a department store, cannot pick out a specific individuals and claim they are trespassing while allowing the rest of the public free access. The same applies to the internet, if you allow free public access to your site, you can't pick out a specific individual, such as a metabrowser, and claim they are trespassing, where everyone else is free to go. The court was clearly wrong on this point. If ebay required membership to browse their website, then they would have a case, but they don't. The second point, and Yahoo seemed to ignore this also in their article, is that metabrowsers are a form of advertisement, in many cases free advertisement. Unfortunately the article doesn't go into ebay's motivations for the suit, but it is self destructive for a company to try to prevent users from finding their products. As to your copyright argument, the only copyright infringement I can see is the short quotations that search engines show to identify the site. Admittedly, they should request permission to use the quotes, and "robots.txt" qualifies as implied consent.

Re:HAHAHAHAHA

[Ralph Wiggam]

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

HAHAHAHAHA

[FascDot Killed My Pr]

"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!
--

eBays robot.txt

[Carnage4Life]

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).

Price checking

[slycer]

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.