Vertical Search Engines and Copyright 62
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:I hate vertical search engines (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:One website's self-justifying legal disclaimer (Score:4, Insightful)
Doesn't the submitter mean "I wrote this page and thought I could get it on
Content Aggregation and Mashups (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Content Aggregation and Mashups (Score:5, Insightful)
But this sharing is where problems arise, as everyone thinks they're entitled to a larger share of the cash than the next person...
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I can already perform much of the above aggregation myself - manually and for free.
If you're talking about someone investing development time for a cool browser plug-in or aggregator website that automated it for me, though . . . well, I know that I for one wouldn't mind kicking in some $$$ for something that useful.
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Precisely. Alone the same lines, the OP blames the 'legal departments' - he doesn't care about other people's rights, or about their ability to pay their bills. He just wants what he wants, now, Now, NOW!
Other people and their rights and interests be dammed.
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You are. You install a browser plugin that adds the button to the Amazon.com pages that you view - it just takes the ISBN number from the Amazon page and matches it up with the ISBN number at the library and adds the button for you.
Maybe you have to pay for that plugin, but quite likely it'll be a free plugin just like many plugins currently are.
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I'm glad you don't care where or how the aggregation happens, but who is going to pay the bills?
As technology (both hardware and software) progresses, these bills might become so low that it won't really matter much any more.
Perhaps at that point we'll have the whole of social computing running on an open, distributed, p2p-like system so that we all share the "bills" without even thinking about it. Or are we going to continue with this walled-garden approach to user-generated content? "Open APIs" like the Facebook API aren't open enough, IMO, as Facebook is the gatekeeper and still has the final s
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If they were innovative there wouldn't be a problem. Using other people's copyrighted material is likely to cause problems though, right?
> There is so much potential here for crossover - and it's all data that already exists!
Yes, but it's *not your data*!
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If you've done either of these great things, why not claim a name for yourself, Mr. AC? Maybe a little self-promotion would help your courageous investment of millions and the brilliant original content you have created? Oh, you haven't do
Digg and YouTube are mashups? (Score:4, Informative)
Or am I just out of touch?
-Rick
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-Rick
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If he weighs the same as a duck, he's made of wood. And therefore ...
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Ughhh, I can't freaking stand "mashup"! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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
Craig's gone man, sold out, walked away. I believe it was to these [ebay.com] people.
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mashup's (Score:3, Interesting)
If it's a site that is funded strictly from ads, then they have a lot to lose by others ripping their content. But at the same time mashups are a wonderful way of getting a lot of similar info together so it's a convenience to the end user.
Attribution and Citation (Score:4, Insightful)
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I am making something similar (Score:3, Interesting)
Then, as a human might do if he were obsessive, checks the section indexes for updates say every 10 minutes and incrementally stores new posts.
The data in sqlite is then indexed by the ferret search engine library, so that it can perform searches on the post content and uses gtk2's libnotify to pop up a notification bubble if it has found anything you previously said you were interested in.
I have not gotten banned in any way from craigslist, and I don't expect to be, since beyond the initial download of the sections, it behaves no different than an obsessive human who might be looking at 10 pages every X minutes. With this, I would be necessarily one of the first people to notice anything on the site that I'm interested in.
I will probably release this on my site for everyone. I'm aware it's against the terms of service to completely mirror the entire site, but does this count as mirroring? Can it be deemed similar to greping your firefox cache, or personal mirroring and indexing?
I know I'm sure as hell going to use it, that's why I made it, but it is an awkward feeling that if I give it away for free and people liked it, that I could get into some kind of trouble.
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First Hand Experience (Score:4, Interesting)
Sounds similar (Score:2)
Then again, news = current events and current events are not copyrightable..
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Yahoo Pipes and Craigslist (Score:1)
Legality, Politeness and De facto Standards (Score:2)
Anyway the comments so far seem to be blurring together several important but very different notions.
taking other people's content and adding more ads. (Score:2)
used to do the same thing, but they would stick Google Ads in between the actual scraped content so you were more inclined to accidently click a Google Ad than the Classified that you really wanted to see.
ABCFREE.COM seems to have lost their Google Ad account because of this and then I guess it was not worth scraping Craigslist anymore because the site has "down for maintenence" page up now for quite some time.
How many other sites had a business plan like this based on scraping
Mashups? (Score:1)
different genres of music collaborating for a song, such as
Eminem and Elton John, or Nelly and Tim McGraw, or when a producer
of a Mix-tape samples various older songs from different genres and makes
some sort of a dance mix, or even an entirely new song.
Those would be cool to see more of.
Job boards are ruthless (Score:1)
What really miffs me, is how the job boards can say they "own" the content, when actually, it's been posted by other people on these sites and is really their content.