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"Scraping" is dangerous game

"Scraping" is the practice of taking data from other online firms and reorganizing or improving on it. The article's lead anecdote shows that scraping is risky business--you can either have an instant Web business or an instant lawsuit, depending on the case.

3 Jan 2008

In one instance, someone was hit with a big fat "Cease and Desist" note from craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster. But isn't the Web supposed to be all about openness? Maybe that's Web 3.0, and Web 2.0 firms like craigslist aren't ready for it. That said, scraping has been an enormous success for Zillow, a real estate site that pulls map data from several partners and combines it with real estate data from public records to estimate a property's market value. Another startup called Mint lets users pull their financial information and put it into an interface "that puts Quicken to shame."

Scraping isn't just for heady entrepreneurs: software giant Microsoft is hard at work on a service called Photosynth that uses images from photo services like Flickr and turns them into 3D models. Of course, Web giants like Google and Yahoo (which owns Flickr) encourage third parties to put their data to new uses. When will the smaller guys follow?

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