Alexa and copyright

[Danny Sullivan]

> This practice strikes me as the largest violation of intellectual
> property rights and copyright law in the history of civilization.
> But then I'm not a lawyer, just a librarian and Web publisher.
> Alexa did not ask my permission to archive my Web sites, nor to
> republish them on demand even when I withdraw pages from
> publication. 

Did you actually ask Alexa to remove your pages and be told they 
wouldn't? If so, I'm surprised. I believe Alexa gets around the 
copyright concerns by agreeing not to index any page if a site owner 
has objections. Primarily, they do this through the use of the 
robots.txt file.

Also, while Alexa started as an archiving project, most people are 
raving about the site discovery service it offers. Should the 
copyright issue really become a concern, Alexa could easily drop it 
and continue on in popularity, in my opinion.


-----------------------------------
Danny Sullivan 
Editor, Search Engine Watch
http://searchenginewatch.com