How I got sued by Facebook (2010)

Re:How I got sued by Facebook (2010) by randomwalker on Friday March 25, 2011 @05:13AM (#2367758)

Lawsuit nastiness aside, there's an interesting and important legal-technical question that this exposes: how should websites specify acceptable uses of crawled data and other fine-grained restrictions in a machine-readable form.

Motivated by this incident, I got together with Pete (the author/victim) to write a piece on "The Need to Reboot Robots.txt" [1] but it went nowhere.

Any suggestions on how to give our proposal legs would be much appreciated.

[1] http://33bits.org/2010/12/05/web-crawlers-privacy-reboot-rob...

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Re:How I got sued by Facebook (2010) by blauwbilgorgel on Friday March 25, 2011 @05:46AM (#2367814)

You can set the SyndicationRight directive for OpenSearch.

"Contains a value that indicates the degree to which the search results provided by this search engine can be queried, displayed, and redistributed."

The default is "open" meaning: - The search client may request search results. - The search client may display the search results to end users. - The search client may send the search results to other search clients.

http://www.opensearch.org/Specifications/OpenSearch/1.1#The_...

That would give you more fine-grained control over what search agents do with your data. I don't know how broad the support and adherence is to the OpenSearch spec (IMDB uses it).

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