Taking a site description from Dmoz Just out of curiosity, if I want to add a new listing to my directory and I need a short, accurate description of the site - may I take/copy/borrow/steal (fill in the blanks) the description from Dmoz? On one hand, the site owner wrote the description - not Dmoz staff, but on the other hand - I'm taking it from the Dmoz site. What's your take on this?
I guess my question would be why you NEED to copy a description? Can you not create one quality enough to descrive your site? On topic, I would consider copying a description the same as copying content, no matter who wrote it.
Go ahead and steal it. If anyone complains, you can always plead insanity. Any competent lawyer would simply point out to the court that you stole the description from DMOZ and you'd be acquitted in a matter of minutes.
Minstrel, would you please testify for me in court, as an expert witness? You seem to know a lot about directories, Dmoz and insanity. It's hard to find that combo on the market these days. Anyway, when it comes to just one site, you guys are totally right - but when you have a new niche directory and you need to fill it quickly, I'm looking for legal ways to help me do it quicker.
Avishai, what you propose to do (verbatim copying of dmoz descriptions, without attributing them to dmoz) would violate the ODP copyright. See http://dmoz.org/guidelines/copyright.html and http://dmoz.org/license.html for details of the legalities. The dmoz data (best acquired as the RDF dump) is made freely available to webmasters such as yourself. Many websites use it to provide a directory on the site or to populate a new directory quickly. (Since you have a niche directory, you would want only a small part of the total dmoz RDF dump.) You must, however, give credit to dmoz and link to dmoz.org, as described at http://dmoz.org/license.html.
Thanks for the info, Orlady. Appreciate it. I wasn't sure, so I asked here and now that I know that it's wrong, I won't do it. I'm sure that even Mistrel's expert testimony in court on by behalf, won't save me from Dmoz lawyers fingernails. I thought of another "shortcut". Please tell me how legit is it. What if I enter a site and copy its meta description from the source file? Am I stealing content? Is it content? After all, it's the most accurate description given by the site owner himself - isn't it?
A lot of websites neglect to includa a meta description, but I'd assume the site owner put it there to be used to describe the site so I see no problem with using it.
Not really! It's the description the site owner likes or thinks is best, but it's not always accurate, or useful. I think if you're making a niche directory you would want to spend a little extra time to make it really shine and that would make people take notice. I am so tired of seeing slapped-together "directories" that look like someone did the work after drinking a case of beer. I'm not saying that's what yours would be like, but good directories are hard to find!
Yes really. Leaving aside the obvious "bait and switch" spammers, for most webpages/sites, how the site owner describes his site is usually FAR more accurate and informative than the DMOZ description, in my experience. Why do you think so many webmasters complain about Google using DMOZ's version instead of their own?
Meta descriptions are what we are using to put together our directory. That's what you would see if you found it through a search engine. Also, I think the site owners will be more appreciative to have their descriptions used rather than someone else's (DMOZ).
I'm a long time dmoz editor and believe wholeheartedly in the project so trust me on this one, minstrel is absoultely right. We have to edit according to guidelines so the dmoz descriptions are necessarily bare-bones. We consider every word that's in the category path to be part of the description so it's not generally repeated in the description we write for any given site. Taken out of that context, the dmoz descriptions are missing the most important parts, the keywords. For example, if you breed goldfish, the word "goldfish" will almost never be in the description. Personally I'd like to include words from the category path just for that reason but given all the other work we have to do bring up the topic is not a priority. IMO, it also becomes a problem when categories are moved or renamed so I try hard to consider that when I write a description, but we can't always do it. Another possibility would be to start with the dmoz description but rewrite it, making sure to include the words from the category path. Building a directory is fun, good luck to you!
Me 3, I like his sense of humor. Its a Fine Day. Its good for Humors for a change. Hoorraaayyy for Minstrel.