In John Sumser's Job Jackers II he outlines the basis for calling job search verticals and aggregators "vandals" and it's the copyright issue:
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The question of the meaning of copyright law is very far from settled. Typically, the courts around the world (except, perhaps, China) have tended to rule deeply and conservatively in the favor of the individual copyright holder. Our sympathies lie in that direction (we get pretty significant benefit from the various search engines, however and don't want to bite the foot that stomps our grapes).
It's true there's an issue there, but it may not be a crucial one. A detail that he's obscuring is that a great deal of the content in the verticals databases is delivered by xml feeds FROM the job boards that he says are being vandalized.
It's true that our developers and database administrators HATE having the board 'scraped'. If it's done inconsiderately, it can put a big burden on the servers and at first might even look like a malicious attack. But it's not difficult to block these spiders.
The point is that anyone who's being vandalized by the verticals WANTS to be vandalized.
Finally, some of the job search verticals like TopUSAJobs.com and DiversityJobs.com don't do ANY spidering -- they are all feed driven. As our industry matures, feeds will proliferate and the need for anonymous spidering will drop significantly.
