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Vertical Search Engines and Copyright

Posted by kdawson on from the in-the-aggregate dept.

An anonymous reader writes "I am a big fan of Oodle, the online classifieds aggregator. I was disheartened when Craigslist announced that they would block Oodle from their site in late 2005 (old link), as I find their service very handy. I came across this page at the site of an aggregator of freelance job openings that summarizes the arguments around the legality of meta search engines and mashup-like sites and I found myself wondering if Oodle could have avoided the ban. There is an interesting argument there that seems to undermine copyright claims of user-generated content compilations. Are mashups legal? How does this affect sites like Digg or YouTube?"

3 of 62 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Content Aggregation and Mashups by Phroggy · · Score: 3, Informative

    Crosslinking through simple knowledge of "which person on one service is which person on another service" - and "which product on one service is which product on another service" - would open so many doors. Wasn't this more or less the dream of Microsoft Passport?
    --
    $x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
    $x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
  2. Digg and YouTube are mashups? by RingDev · · Score: 3, Informative

    Now, maybe I'm just not keen on the latest batch of synergistical leet speak, but aren't Digg and YouTube user contribution driven aggragators? Isn't the key feature of a Mashup that it uses functionality from different web services to create a new set of functionality? Say like tieing CNN's RSS feed to Google Maps to Flicker to get an interactive graphical, geographical, news browsing interface.

    Or am I just out of touch?

    -Rick

    --
    "Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
  3. Re:Ughhh, I can't freaking stand "mashup"! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    Craig is still the chairman. Look at their site.