Hi I have found a website which crawls other websites on a daily basis for new content and then adds it to its website. Now my question is if the website has not stated anything about not copying there content can i crawl there site and add there content to my website? Can they make any legal threats agianst me? Thanks in advance.
If content is provided via an RSS feed then there is no issue, if the content is taken and used without the permission of the site owner then than is against the sites intellectual rights. As you may or may not be aware it is not necessary to copyright content, you still have rights. My advice would be make your own content or give up on your website as if you dont have the drive to create your own whats the point in having one?
I think, if the website has not stated anything about not copying there content you can do all you want with its content.
Yes but none of the games are actually created by the site owner he only copies it from another site. I know i can copy it one by one by hand that no problem. But would it be a problem if i get a crawler to do it for me? Like can he send me a legal notice or anything telling me to stop my crawler.
That site owner can't really say anything to you, as the copyright rights are for the original creator. After the Copyright Act or 1976, work no longer must provide copyright notice, however, any work created before then still requires it. However, the copyright owner can sue you if he chooses, or send you a Cease and Desist, as well as other things. I would advise against taking things from other websites without that persons permission.
scraping is stealing. RSS does not allow you to steal content. Saying RSS allows free content is kinda like saying an open window allows people to steal from your home. The RSS is for syndication so people can read your copyrighted content in their own reader. It does not mean I can take your content and add it to my website as my own unless the copyright allows me too.
Can you please read my thread properly before answering, no point making pointless posts just to get your post count up. Thanks to those who did read the thread properly and adviced me properly.
I have a similar issue. My website crawls google for the query that a user enters and get's the top 3 sites. It than crawl's these 3 sites for there navigational links, description and keywords and displays them... I havn't published the website yet, but how would this fair in relation to Google? I don't think my website crawling Google for links is any different to google crawling the websites they index (they also display 'Sitelinks' on occasion).
I dont think you will have much problem with that since you are still linking back on to there site once your user clicks on the link that was crawled.
I agree with networktown.net as long as your not actually taking their content, but are forwarding them to those sites (pretty much a search engine if you think about it) you should be good.