ZDNet: News: Judge to rule against Bidder's Edge General IP Issues6/5/2000; 7:15:27 AM April 17, 2000: "A federal judge said he plans to issue a preliminary injunction against Bidder's Edge Inc. in a suit brought by eBay Inc., a victory for the big online auctioneer in a battle that could have wide implications for Internet commerce."This has been a long time coming and opens the door to more debates then you can shake a stick at. "Daniel Bergeson, a partner at Bergeson & Eliopoulos LLP in San Jose, said eBay's argument is simple. 'When you visit a site, you can't take that information and use it for your own purposes, especially for commercial purposes,' he said."I think in this case, "commercial purposes" on the part of Bidder's Edge is pretty clear. But how about search engines? Is that commercial use of site data... or just use of the site data that happens to have advertisements on it, independent of the search results?I think that the only consistent answer is that no, you CAN'T just abscond with another sites data and use it for commercial purposes... and yes, search engines are 'commercial purposes'. However, with search engines, a good case can and should be made that they are already common practice, and that it is well known how to stop polite search engines from searching your site by using a standardized file called robots.txt.A reason I think this is fair is that it cuts both ways. It also means that nobody can walk off with your weblog and proceed to make big bucks with it. It doesn't just protect eBay, it levels the field for everybody. The alternative, that you can walk off with content and profit off of it, results in big money always winning.(And a gentle reminder that if you give permission to somebody, they can do whatever you gave them permission to do. Userland's weblog search engine would be unaffected by this ruling, because you have to explicitly ask them to index your weblog.)