Talk:Cyber Property

Ryan Kaneshiro Search engines rely on sponsored matches as a source of revenue. What is the legal status of the so-called meta-search engines that extract results from a variety of engines and group them together? Companies like Copernic, and more locally, MetaCrawler, have products that essentially piggy-back upon the crawling and indexing work done by Google, Yahoo, and others and typically do not display the same ads in the merged results. Advertisers might be reluctant to pay for new ads if use of these meta engines grows in popularity. Can search engine companies claim that these meta engines are trespassing on their results pages? Is it technically possible to detect the difference between a search done by a user and a search done by an automated agent?

Shaun Padden It would be interesting to explore how copyright law applies to websites and where it does or does not make sense relative to traditional publishing. For example, I know there's a way to restrict what parts of your site crawlers are allowed to visit via a robots.txt file, but this only happens if the crawler voluntarily abides by the standard. Does the site owner have any right to restrict who can download information that's been posted online, or are his/her rights only violated by improper usage of material from the site, such as re-posting somewhere else? Does it matter if it's a computer program rather than an individual accessing the material?