[WEB4LIB] Meta Search

[Avi Rappoport]

As far as I know, the legal issues are not yet played out.  It's even 
more complex across international borders.

However, if anyone will get sued for indexing data from external 
sites or metasearching, it's likely to be someone with a very high 
profile and very deep pockets, such as AltaVista or Disney Go or 
Go2Net (metacrawler and dogpile).

That said, when I was working on a content aggregation product, a 
very high-profile lawyer wrote us some advice which was basically 
"ask first".  If you ask the sites to participate in your project and 
offer them referrals, they might well do that.  Then you're covered.

Hope that helps,

Avi

At 2:32 PM -0700 8/16/2000, Rondon Andrade wrote:
>Hi Everybody!!
>
>I'd like to know about the legal implications on building a Meta Search.
>Since a search goes through a lot of sites, we can be mining the web,
>stoling content of other sites and putting in others as a cut and paste
>service. But if we cite the source, are we free from any legal implications?
>Or we just cite the information source and communicate this information
>sources what we're doing and it's done. No problem at all.
>
>I'm asking this because I work with data mining, and I wouldn't like to have
>legal problems. If I say for instance:
>
>a "information" from Company B
>a "information" from Company C
>
>but not changing the content, will it be fine?
>
>Thanks in advance and waiting your response.
>
>
>Rondon de Andrade
>Information Analyst

-- 
________________________________________________________________
Avi Rappoport, Search Tools Maven: <mailto:avirr at lanminds.com>
Guide to Site, Intranet and Portal Search Engines: <http://www.searchtools.com>