

Ask HN: How do mashups avoid copyright infringement lawsuits? - villageidiot

Services like Dapper, Yahoo Pipes and Feedity facilitate the creation of mashups that are essentially built off other sites' data by retrieving that data as a convenient RSS feed.<p>Why do we not see more intellectual property lawsuits as a result of these recent applications of screen scraping?<p>I was looking at the Wikipedia entry for web scraping:<p>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_scraping<p>Under the "Legal Issues" section it talks about the tort issue called "Trespass To Chattels" which covers a wide variety of computer trespass crimes, including web scraping but from what I can tell there are very few recent lawsuits with respect to web scraping. The big one was Ticketmaster vs Tickets.com but that was back in 2000:<p>http://www.tomwbell.com/NetLaw/Ch07/Ticketmaster.html<p>Sites like popurls, alltop, google news, aggregate data from other news sites. According to copyright law, this should be permissable as long as the quote is limited and not a complete republication. These sites seem to follow this guideline.<p>But are there other recent sites that do not, who you would expect to fall afoul of the law? How do they avoid litigation - by asking the originating site for permission to republish? By paying the content owners for the privilege to republish? Or has the commonness of the Web2.0ish way of regurgitating content made this a moot issue by now - to the point where most original content owners have given up on trying to control the ownership of their content through litigation?
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neilk
Mashups are not all one thing. Sometimes it's a lone hacker modifying their
own data, so licenses are not an issue. Sometimes it's data that the authors
intended to be shared. And sometimes people are just retards and they steal or
misuse other peoples' stuff.

Flickr is all about sharing and it tries pretty hard to give the users tools
to control access to data and to express their licensing intent. For example,
as much as is possible, there is simply no trace of private data in searches
that don't have proper authorization. For public data, it is not a given that
you can republish or modify the work. So the atom feeds have links to the
licenses for each photo or video, and the API has similar features when
obtaining photo info.

Users are able to grant a mashup app access to their private data in a
formalized way (and to revoke it later). Finally, Flickr is also able to
revoke the rights of any particular app to download data or simply throttle
them to a reasonable amount per day.

All sites that offer RSS or an API should do these sorts of things. (The oAuth
standard is a formalization of some of the techniques that sites like Flickr
use.)

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kwamenum86
How do you know these sites are not retrieving content using RSS feeds? In
this case the "social contract" says that the content owner consent to
syndication.

In reality any reproduction of content is a violation of copyright law- no if,
ands, or buts about it. Even Google's act of displaying text from web pages in
their search results is infringement but of course they are safe because they
are so useful and the web would be nothing without search engines. But there
is no implicit permission being given.

The same rule likely applies to mashups (although I do not know of any that
have been taken to court.) Why litigate if an app helps users consume your
content (there are exceptions of course. For example, if page views on your
actual site decrease and you lose money as a result.)

~~~
pedalpete
your comment about "any reproduction of content is a violation of copyright
law" is absolutely wrong and has been overruled in the courts many times
(perfect 10 v. google, sheffield news v. sheffield times).

Google can display text from web pages because they attribute the text to the
site and provide a link to the original source. There are limitations on use
which is why google paid for their book search functionality.

~~~
kwamenum86
What you have come up with is a fuzzy case, not clear cut. Even with fair use,
the way search engines use content can easily be considered infringement.

I still stand by my statement and the only reason search engines are allowed
to copy petabytes of COPYRIGHTED material is because they are so darn useful.
I don't know of any other service that sidesteps intellectual property rights
(whether through fair use or not) and makes a good amount of money that has
been allowed to exist and thrive.

------
inklesspen
By being too small to bother with.

~~~
villageidiot
So you think that once a mashup passes a certain threshold of popularity they
need to deal with this legal issue but not before then?

~~~
pmjordan
I guess it also depends on whether it generates traffic (revenue, awareness,
whatever) for the sites from which it takes its content. Don't bite the hand
that feeds you and all that.

~~~
redorb
lots of time it takes major funding or acquisition by another company to make
them a target... (I.e. YouTube)

~~~
mattmaroon
YouTube was a target before the acquisition, they just hadn't moved on it yet.
The speed with which Google paid off all of the rights holders (at the same
time they acquired them) would indicate that it was far from the first time
they'd thought of that.

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russell
"Or, do mashups in a moderate way so that you are only providing limited
quotes of the originating site and providing attribution?"

That's the civil way.

"It is often easier to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission." --
Grace Hopper

------
quizbiz
I am not a lawyer but isn't it just like comedians cant be sued for copying
something and giving it a spin? These are service sites, not content sites, so
they are preforming a task upon the content and thus it's okay to do what
ever. right?

------
villageidiot
Leaving aside the obvious ethical issue here, what's the solution? Don't do
mashups? Or, do mashups in a moderate way so that you are only providing
limited quotes of the originating site and providing attribution? Or, say to
hell with it, I'll do what I want and only worry about legal problems if I get
big enough that someone comes after me?

