Forum Moderators: not2easy
Do you think this verbage would make a search engine hesitant to list our articles?
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[website name] Material
Copyright [website name] 2003-2004. Material contained on the [website name] website is protected by copyright and shall not be published, broadcast, rewritten for broadcast or publication or redistributed directly or indirectly in any medium. Neither this Material nor any portion thereof may be stored in a computer except for personal and non-commercial use.
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Just wondering...
That said - once it's out there it's out there. I wouldn't worry so much about the SEs as I would about those that simply steal content...
I WANT to be indexed in the SE's - yet put the legal jumbo to help thwart content thieves. I was just wondering if one affected the other.
Your copyright notice is a good thing, but the majority of ripoff artists won't pay attention. They will just copy your stuff and use it until you call attention to them and/or shut them down. Of course, if you are lucky enough to get ripped off by a domestic company with deep pockets, you might be able to collect some damages.
"Your copyright notice is a good thing, but the majority of ripoff artists won't pay attention." rogerd
>> Yeah, we know. Just trying to create a trail of evidence. We're spending a bunch of $$ with some top writers and want to protect that investment.
Thanks for the feedback!
Considering that robots.txt is such a well accepted convention, it would be a good argument that the DMCA (and equivalent legislation worldwide) provisions on RMI can apply here: an automated agent that works around your robots.txt is potentially avoiding your RMI and thus infringing copyright, because the robots.txt is a technological measure for rights management information. Anyone practicing the art of using spiders and automated agents would know about robots.txt: claiming to not know about them effectively amounts to negligent behaviour.
You can arrange your ToS (which is a license) to specifically address different forms of licensing, one of which is automated agents. I have done this using the following sort of verbiage (I should really replace it with a standard open source license):
``... conditions: you agree, that in your use of the artifacts, as granted by the terms, to ... employ honest, acceptable, reasonable and good faith practices in the use of the artifacts, such as appropriate technical measures, such as the robots exclusion protocol and appropriate user agent identification ...
... license to index: subject to the terms, you are granted a license to index the artifacts, including the use of automated processes to access the artifacts, on the condition that (a) the indexes use our title, description and other relevant meta fields to provide descriptions; (b) the indexes are available for non-commercial purposes only; (c) the indexes are available for a charge no more than the reasonable costs of indexing and maintaining the indexes; (d) you notify us by official correspondence within 28 days upon the insertion of the artifacts in the index (unless otherwise notified in our server access logs by appropriate user agent information). ...``
To be honest, this isn't really a practical licensing term as automated agents can't be expected to understand it, nor can an SE be expected to police all of it's content in such detail, so really robots.txt is only approach.
In one case, this kind of material was useful: my weekly report threw up a UA that walked my entire site at 8Kbps and triggered hits indicating that it ignored robots.txt, and also used a UA field that looked like an interactive web browser rather than an automated tool. The source of activity was a rather large and well known company in the field of computer security: I forwarded the the report off to them with template blurb indicating that this violated serveral explicit provisions in my ToS not to mention acceptable rules of conduct in the community (to be honest, the activity didn't really worry me, I was more curious about what would happen as an experiment and to make sure that they play by the rules, and surprised that such activity would come out of what is a large and well known organisation expected to have high integrity and principles). Within hours I received a response from a senior manager in IT security of said company asking for more details. I'm not sure what came of it. It could have been someone using falisfied IP addresses. Who knows: it could have alerted them to some illicit activities that they were not aware of.
The point is, though, that if something does happen: then at least you've already organised the ball to be in your court so that you can deal with it quickly. I think you'd need to be competent enough to know what you are doing: as it's possible to make the situation worse if you don't. For a big name big income big potential liability site, this would be standard behaviour (the well funded legal department can take care of it) - it's a little different for the smaller guys.
Things like ToS and other things can sometimes seem like they are not worth the effort: but they're a bit of insurance in some ways. There are endless legal cases that have hinged on the terms of a contract or licensing agreement.
There, that's my rant for the evening!
