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

Can I copy your pages and then charge people to see them?

Author:Brian Carnell
Posted:12/18/1999; 12:41:52 PM
Topic:Can I copy your pages and then charge people to see them?
Msg #:13697
Prev/Next:13696 / 13698

Several weeks ago during the discussion over Third Voice and similar software I posted a link and a brief commentary on CatchTheWeb. At the time CTW was being pitched by Math Strategies as a way to capture web pages to a local server and then distribute them over an Intranet, which I had a lot of concerns about. Apparently the Intranet market for such services was small, so they've gone to an Internet approach:

From CatchTheWeb.Com:

"CatchTheWeb is now available as an enterprise solution enabling a team to pool its Web research. Authorized members capture what they find on the Web, add a note, and immediately make it available through a rented CatchTheWeb site. It's important to note from the outset that CatchTheWeb captures actual HTML content, graphics and other components, not just bookmarks. All are stored on the database server. A powerful search capability is made possible by full text indexing."

As a freelance writer, I have serious concerns with this sort of approach. If somebody is storing copies of my articles in an online database like this without my permission I think it is a clear case of copyright violation. What really worries me here is that using this technology, depending on how fast it is, I could easily go into business as an information-broker offering very specialized Lexis-Nexis type databases for a fee offering full text retrieval without compensating the authors (or the rights holders) of such works as Lexis-Nexis would be required to do.

For example, I am very interested in pharmaceutical companies. Using this service I could suck all of the materials on Yahoo!, CNN, etc. about pharmaceutical companies and then basically become a reseller of that info. My users would never again need to visit Yahoo!, CNN, etc.

While it worries me, on the other hand I don't see anyone realistic way to stop the creation of such private databases. Yahoo! might have the wherewithall to sue over such copyright violations, but I know I don't.

Any thoughts?

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