Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Differentiating scraping and linking activities

Author:James Carlyle
Posted:9/2/1999; 4:33:33 AM
Topic:Who owns what parts of your webpage?
Msg #:10443 (In response to 10437)
Prev/Next:10442 / 10444

I agree that these activities cannot be differentiated by whether they are performed by machine or weblogger. The way in which the activities you describe can be differentiated is whether they benefit or harm the target.

For example, most people would agree that search engines benefit the sites they index. If you publish something publicly, you want people to find it, if it matches what they are looking for.

If Moreover provides notification of a news article on a public site, they are raising the visibility and readership of that article. But if Moreover were to go further, and scrape and publish a summary of the article, then it may begin to harm the target - because the casual reader may only want the summary, and never go on to view the original article. In this way, visibility for the article is actually reduced. In Moreover's case, I believe that they are acting with the publisher's interests at heart, because they always credit the publisher, they no longer publish a summary of the article (only a link), and because part of their revenue model comes from driving traffic to the publisher's site.

But at the end of the day, we cannot rely on people acting with other's interests at heart. If it's on the web, it's in the public domain. Dave once quoted, 'the Net routes around disasters'. It also routes around control.

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