Semantic legalities

I’ve just read a very interesting article on Read/WriteWeb about this new semantic web thing  and some kwaai sites out there that “screen scrape” blogs/sites and formulate the content semantically. The question arose: “Is this legal?”

First, lets look at Dapper. What they do is they allow you to scrape content from sites by defining what is what through a user interface. You then “learn” Dapper what goes where and before you know it, it can convert your web pages to a web service. Hmmm… yes, I know, KICKS ASS!

Yahoo! Pipes is another one that does something similar, but with RSS feeds.

The problem is what if the content is copywrited? What if I go and scrape Tertia’s blog and present it in book format on my own site? Now that sounds unethical and dodgy to say the least! (BTW, congratulations Tertia, for being nominated as a Blooker Award finalist!). I can do that though. Does this mean that the semantic web poses a threat that Tertia will lose her rights to her content? Does this make Copyright statements at the bottom of sites “null-in-void”? It shouldn’t! Does this mean just because content is more accessible it is public domain?

I strongly believe that sites should not be “scraped”. If you want to share your data, you should have tools that will allow you to produce your data in the appropriate microformat. Even then, you should have some control over what is done with your content.

Lucky for us, the guys involved with all these microformat stuff already thought about these issues! They produced another microformat that will enable you to license your handywork called rel-license. In other words, even if you microformat your data, you are still able to control what is done with that data and what restrictions apply to that data.

I’d love to get Paul’s take on this, since he is the legal expert.

technorati tags:semanticweb, web3.0, microformats, legal, rel-license

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3 Comments to "Semantic legalities"

• Paul Jacobson said: On 03/20/2007 at 12:29 pm

  Hey Stii

  No matter what the software does, I don’t believe anyone would lose their rights. If a site ripped content from Tertia’s site (touch wood it never does) and repackages it or something then it would probably be a breach of copyright. The same thing would apply to something like Creative Commons licenses and any other license where the software does something the author did not authorise.

  I was thinking along the lines of a content “nofollow” tag just before I read about the rel-release microformat. Where there are engines that will collect content, there should be tools to manage that in accordance with content creators’ wishes.

• Stii said: On 03/20/2007 at 12:51 pm

  rel-release or rel-license? If rel-release, send the link pleez!

• Paul Jacobson said: On 03/22/2007 at 9:59 pm

  Hi Stii

  I don’t have a link for that thing, it was just something I was thinking about as a solution.

Spit it out!

Filed in: Semantic Web by: Stii