By: Lucia Moses VacancyNet.com Was Deep Linking To Classifieds
A real estate listings Web site said it has agreed to stop appropriating content from
AdOne's Abracat classified site, which draws listings from more than 700 newspapers.
New York-based AdOne sent VacancyNet.com a cease-and-desist letter Wednesday after
learning that the company was aggregating its listings. Founded in 1995, AdOne is
backed by 11 newspaper companies and draws classified ad content those papers at
abracat.com.
VacancyNet, a 3-year-old company based in Indianapolis, is a nationwide rental house
and apartment listings site that aggregates data from a variety of online sites,
including AdOne's, by deep linking. VacancyNet claims more than 3.1 million listings.
Richard Chingombe, an officer in VacancyNet, said while the company wasn't doing anything
illegal by collecting the AdOne data, it agreed to stop.
'It's nothing new,' he said. 'The biggest liability is if one of the people we get
listings from feels we overload their server.'
Chingombe said the company would contact AdOne's partner newspapers individually about
linking to their classifieds.
Newspapers have long complained about the theft of classified ads. But now that they're
putting ads on the Internet, it's easy for upstart Web sites to appropriate their
listings.
Deep linking, a tool commonly used by content aggregators and search engines, takes
Internet users directly to a relevant page on another site, bypassing the hosting Web
site's home page. Often the user doesn't realize the content is being provided by an
outside source. A user of VacancyNet might not realize some of the ads are coming from
Abracat or the originating newspaper.
Two recent court cases have dealt with the legality of deep linking. In a case pitting
Ticketmaster against tickets.com, a federal court found that deep linking didn't violate
copyright law.
In a subsequent ruling last month, however, a federal judge in Silicon Alley effectively
outlawed deep linking by issuing an injunction barring Bidder's Edge from collecting data
from online auction giant eBay. The judge ruled that Bidder's Edge was trespassing by
using an automated search program to harvest information from eBay - information that
eBay considers its own unique, proprietary content.
A similar debate is ongoing in Washington, D.C., where two bills have been introduced in
the U.S. House of Representatives that would protect databases from this type of
appropriation by outsiders. Progress had stalled because of differences between the two
bills, but their authors are being urged to reconcile the two, supported on both sides by
powerful lobbies.
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