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?"

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?

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

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

[Anonymous Coward]

Craig is still the chairman. Look at their site.