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:
-
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.
{ 1 comment }
I just read the Job jackers’ article and I must confess that my first thought was “another crying baby that wants the world to stand still under any pretext”.
Ok, Google lost that lawsuit and some content can’t be published under the Belgium law. Do you really think that makes something better? Does that makes the world better?
The world is changing (and that is not something new, the world has been changing always…, take a look back and think if you would change this time for the Medieval Era) and business need to change accordingly. So, when it comes to copyrights, it seems pretty clear that something needs to be changed or re shaped for the better.
Also, if it was a matter of copyrights it doesn’t go back to the job boards but to the clients/companies. They are the ones that wrote the ad, its their rights. And I bet that most of them will have NO problem in ceding their rights and have their ads published (at no cost for them) somewhere else.
So, copyrights’ seems a pretty weak defense.
Now, let’s take a look into the vandalism theory. Vandalism means: “purposeful destruction or damage of something that is beautiful or something that belongs to someone else; practices or spirit of the Vandals”. We already have seen that the ad is not exactly the job board property but the client property and it is not destroyed, it is shown to a bigger audience. Something similar to an ad.
So think about it under a different light. If you are trying to sale your house, you may want people to enter to your house and take a look. Right?
But as Eric points, if you don’t want people wandering into your house, you can use a lock. Is a pretty common use and so far it works. And when your lock is broken and things are taken out from your house, without your permission you call the police because, yes, those are vandals.
But again, if you are selling your house or you are doing a simple garage sale, you may let people in your house because is convenient for you… and in fact you may invest a couple of dollars in signs to let people know about the sale.
If you don’t want verticals publishing your job, put a simple lock and if they break it, yes, call the police. But if you (as a job board) want more people looking into your stuff because that is good for you (your business) you may not only allow verticals, but feed them and even pay a little to be there. As you pay those few bucks for the “garage sale” signs. Is a small investment and will not really affect your profits.
So, stop crying, look at verticals as what they are, another window to show your stuff and if you still don’t like them…well… you don’t have to use them!