Alexa and copyright

[Greg MacGowan]

But Alexa is still making a profit (I'm assuming they are a for-profit
company) off the intellectual property of others, regardless of whether
those profits are coming from sales of the information or from advertising
(see http://www.alexa.com/support/details/q_13.html ). 

I *think* (as I said, I am not a lawyer) there is a fine line between
storing pages and merely pointing to them, but it is a clear line. I'm
sympathetic to the proposal that Alexa has good intentions (to speed up
access), but I think (again, I am not a lawyer) they may have gone beyond
the letter and spirit of the law because they are copying what is not
rightfully theirs.

Greg

At 08:45 AM 3/26/98 -0800, Jason Biggers wrote:
>On Thu, 26 Mar 1998, Greg MacGowan wrote:
>
>> appropriate page as a search engine would. I don't see a difference between
>> what Alexa is doing and if I were to copy all the back issues of JAMA and
>> sell them at the reference desk. 
>
>I see your infringement issues if Alexa were re-selling/charging  for web
>pages, but Alexa isn't selling, they're storing pages so that you can
>access them if the site/network is down or not responsive.  This is a
>common practice of AOL to "speed" up your access to a site.
>
>
--------------------------------------------------------------
Greg S. MacGowan
Information Technologies Coordinator (and Webmaster)
Brandeis University Libraries
Brandeis University
Waltham, MA  02254-9110

phone: (781) 736-4690 (W)
fax:    (781) 736-4719 
email: macgowan at Brandeis.edu


"You will know when you are calm ... at peace ... passive." -- Yoda