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?"

Comments

Content Aggregation and Mashups

[blaster151]

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.

Re:Content Aggregation and Mashups

[Phroggy]

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?

Re:Content Aggregation and Mashups

[__aaabsi3154]

I'm glad you don't care where or how the aggregation happens, but who is going to pay the bills? If you use Amazon to find local books, what does Amazon get out of it? I think the real winner will not be the person who first creates all this aggregation, but the person who does it all in a way that allow profits to be shared.

But this sharing is where problems arise, as everyone thinks they're entitled to a larger share of the cash than the next person...

Re:Content Aggregation and Mashups

[fbartho]

I think he's saying that Amazon and others get value by pushing their branding, and ads in your face when you use them. Some percentage of users actually generate revenue even though they were only contacted through these free options. Mashups, especially vertical search engines, can cause problems for the providers, because they let a user who currently uses that free stuff and is occasionally swayed by the ads, still get the value (and more) out of the free stuff, without providing any value, AND it lets many more people who didn't use the free data, profit off amazon's grace AND often suck up their outbound bandwidth much more than if the service didn't exist. Amazon's *free data* suddenly lost much of it's value to them, while also suddenly increasing in cost.

Digg and YouTube are mashups?

[RingDev]

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

Ughhh, I can't freaking stand "mashup"!

[Otter]

I found myself wondering if Oodle could have avoided the ban.

If I'm understanding correctly, craigslist has terms of service, and Oodle was systematically violating them. That's their right, whether there's a formal copyright violation or not.

I'd never heard of Oodle, but craigslist is notoriously easygoing and their terms (you can run searches but not mirror the whole damn thing) seem reasonable, so I think the way Oodle could have avoided the ban is by not pissing Craig off.

Re:I hate vertical search engines

[dotpavan]

I am Japanese, you insensitive clod!

Attribution and Citation

[blueZhift]

I don't know if mashups are legal in the strictest sense, but I do have an idea how I would want it to work. Academic publications are impossible to produce without citing the work of others. That's how research works. Information that did not originate with the author is attributed to its respective source(s). No muss, no fuss, usually, and there are accepted conventions for how this is done. Right now I don't think the web has any such accepted conventions, but it should. Practically speaking, it would be impossible to close down all aggregation sites anyway, so the best course of action, imho, would be to develop standards for citing information that comes from other sources. While these still can't be enforced 100%, peer pressure should at least give people the idea that citing sources is a good thing.

First Hand Experience

[w0lver]

I have experience at two companies that did site aggregation. First, with a company that did travel deals but searching other sites and the next was a job site that did the same. Searching and presenting a summary with link to the real live content is legal. Taking the content and re-purposing even with credit is illegal. So as an example, with a travel sight, searching all the airlines, Expedia and so on, and displaying links with prices is valid. However, showing the flights and prices without links and then booking it in the background never displaying the site, illegal. We had a number of companies that tried to sue us, we send over legal opinions and case history on the topic, the suits would disappear. However, we did have a few sites that blacklisted our IPs, tried to break our scraper, and post nasty things about us on other sites.

Re:One website's self-justifying legal disclaimer

[antic]

"I came across this page..."

Doesn't the submitter mean "I wrote this page and thought I could get it on /. for some free publicity..."?