There have been quite a few content aggregation sites that have cropped up in the recent past – both in India and US. ixigo.com, Yahoo Farechase, zoomtra for travel, Yahoo Jobsearch, bixee etc for jobs, spoteazy for electronics and there are many others in US in this space. My question is: What are the legality issues w.r.t content aggregation? Can the host websites sue the content aggregator for using their content for “commercial purposes”?
For example: I build a car portal aggregator from carwale.com, carzoo.com, carsalesindia.com etc. When a user searches on my website, he/she is presented results from any of these websites (with a brief summary) and when he/she clicks the link, they are taken to the host website. My revenue stream is sponsored ads. Once I get sufficient traffic, I may also open up the site to take listings directly.
Can carwale.com etc sue me on the basis “I am using their information for commercial purposes” or “I am using copyrighted content” etc – and yes, its written in the terms and conditions of all the content websites that their content cannot be used for commercial use without their explicit approval.
Atleast with travel, jobs the main revenue stream for the host web sites is not ad based (they are getting paid for subscription or when a transaction takes place). So content aggregators may not be perceived as direct competitors. But for free listing providers such as directory services, car listings, yellow pages, real estate websites where their primary revenue stream is also ad-based, content aggregators can be perceived as direct competitors (even though they drive traffic to the host site).
Do you think the host websites would actively sue the content aggregators. btw, CAN they sue? What about the “fair use” clauses – can they protect the content aggregators (in India)?
First of all, is this a big issue? How are the current content aggregators (in India) dealing with this issue? And should start-ups be worried about this? And how should they deal with this?
I would appreciate if anyone can shed more light on this.
regards
Vamsi (http://vamsikv.wordpress.com)
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Vamsi, What was your final verdict after this analysis. Did you finally develop any aggregate sites? Surely aggregate sites have a role to play in the market, whether it would affect the publisher, affect the ranking of the website is yet to be seen as there arent that many players in the market now.
I think, the startup _should_ take permission from the content source before crawling and extracting data. Generally (check their legal policy) you won’t need to take permission if the content source provides RSS feeds/syndication outlets to open public.
I think a content source will be willing to offer their content to the startup If you present the content on your site in such a way that helps the content source build brand name, attract traffic, help increase sales, etc.
“If there is no potential loss of ad-revenue, what other argument does a parent site (content provider) have to support itself?”
Aloke – There could be a lot of potential issues. Here are a few
1) The content provider might hold the copyright to the content.
2) Content provider might be getting that content from a third party with no re-distribution rights. They might have issues with the third party if you are using the content and pointing links back to the content provider.
3) Content Provider can lose content exclusivity.
4) Search engine rankings can be affected.
Ajay, yes, the revenues will through ads and referrals to the original site. Apparently this is ixigo.com’s business model
Vamsi.
I have a question regarding this. If the destination site is a transaction oriented site, and my site is showing links to this site, how will my site earn revenues?
Would it be
1. Ads (like google AdSense)?
2. Money from the original site “(for advertising)”?
or something else?
Agree with the consensus here. If the destination site is a transaction oriented site, they normally don’t discourage crawling/aggregation. On the other hand, if the destination site is just “listing” type of site and the end user can get all the info from without even visiting there, its obviously hurting their business. We at TheFind.com crawl hundreds of thousands of shopping sites across the web and have rarely seen issues (as long as the crawler is polite enough and doesn’t hit them really hard and ofcourse obeys robots.txt). In fact a lot of merchants are happy that they are getting traffic without any of their efforts (since we crawl and don’t require data feeds)