Forum Moderators: not2easy
Here's a couple of brief quotes:
"A jury in Tampa, Fla., awarded $300,000 in damages – including $50,000 in punitive damages – to Nautical Solutions Marketing, a St. Petersburg, Fla.-based yacht broker in a dispute over Nautical’s right to cull data from other sites on the Web to find yachts meeting its customer’s specifications."
"The issue was who owned the rights to the information," Conwell said. "Did YachtWorld or the broker own the listing? What we established was the listings belong to the broker."
If this is true, what sort of impact does this have on companies like eBay?
In general, taking information from one site and using it on yours is almost certainly going to be problematic. With broker/auction listings, a fair amount of redisplay goes on but it's often not considered to be a problem, as the visitor ends up at the original site anyway in most cases. If I'm selling something, and other sites want to provide free exposure, why not let them run with it? On the other hand, if my revenue is based more on ads, or if the other site might cannibalize new listings, then it becomes a problem.
I've had other sites "rebroadcast" job listings from one of my sites. I've never worried about it, as the resumes come to me anyway. If I decided to copy all the current listings from monster.com to pump up my site, though, I suspect I'd hear from their attorneys rather quickly.
How is it that monster.com can transfer ownership of these listings .. they didn't write them, the employer's did.
If monster.com allowed search engines to crawl their site .. would they be allowed to keep you from crawling their site?
And what if you got permission from the employers. Lets say you crawled monster, and then sent a massive amount of emails to employers saying that you'd list their ads for free (following all can-spam rules) ..
Obviously, the employers would have little reason to complain.
It's another question of copyright .. are websites allowed to transfer copyrights away from their owners when they enter information?
If so, what happens if you (the employer) legitimately used the same monster.com ad on another website?
Could monster.com sue someone, even though the website you posted on didn't crawl in order to get the copy?
Websites CAN affect the rights of authors/copyright holders by their terms of service or other contracts. For instance, a site could claim the right to publish any content posted on its site in other formats.
(Note that this is mostly speculation and common sense, not legal advice. :))
In the above case with boat/yachtworld/nautical .. the Boat Rover did not post a boat without the permission of the original author (I believe if I read that right).
To take your example, further: I am an employer and I have written an ad an placed it on monster.com.
What is the difference between me posting the ad on another website, and that website asking me if I wish to post that ad on their site?
The difference is how the website got the ad, of course. In one case they crawled monster and in the other case they 'crawled' me.
It is a curious copyright question. I think at some point, robots.txt will have a legal significance and crawlers must respect it or face legal consequences.
It appears that the broker asserted that the Nautical bot was trespassing. The jury rejected this argument.
It looks as if the jury verdict awarded damages for defamatory statements.
