Slashdot Mirror
Vertical Search Engines and Copyright
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?"
In content aggregation lies all of my excitement about the future of the web (if people are allowed to continue being innovative and aren't prevented by heel-dragging by legal departments).
I don't even care if the aggregation happens server-side or browser-side. I want to be able to view a book product page on Amazon and click a "place local library hold" button. I want to be able to view my LiveJournal Friends page and have a superimposed queue and "recently watched" displays for those folks who are also my Netflix friends. Or current weather reports for those friends' locations. Fun stuff. I want to be able to stumble across an old news story and have a "there are 117 comments when this story was posted to Slashdot five months ago" notification.
There is so much potential here for crossover - and it's all data that already exists! 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. I hope legal departments don't keep preemptively closing them. To me, this is what would excite me if it were true about "Web 2.0" - beyond just simple pretty, AJAX-enabled user interfaces. Although those are cool, too.