Completely agree. Been reading about this in various forms throughout the day and am glad to see Mashable taking the initiative here. Well done and best of luck to [Alexa]holic.
Mark Devlin
· 2 years ago
I am a regualar user of Alexaholic. It is disgraceful that Alexa is bullying a company for using the tools it provides. Shame on Amazon.
Alex
· 2 years ago
this is absolutely ridiculous on amazon's part -- i think the most disgraceful part is their push for "openness" while they're simultaneously suing this guy. they should be trying to buy/hire him, instead. good luck ron!
Bilal Hameed
· 2 years ago
Well Pete so much for asking others to uninstall and stop using Amazon API's, but what will we bloggers be doing ?
How about agreeing on a self imposed ban to not report any news pertaining to Amazon or ones in which Amazon is a party.
It wont hurt us, we would still have plenty of stuff to report, but it will surely make higher ups at Amazon shiver.
Think about it and let me know.
Pete Cashmore
· 2 years ago
Bilal,
Fair enough. Not covering Alexa is easy...I don't trust their stats too much anyway (and I hope that statsaholic will add other stat providers for comparison).
Not sure what we'll do re:Amazon coverage.
Bilal Hameed
· 2 years ago
What do you mean by re:Amazon coverage couldnt get this.
Pete Cashmore
· 2 years ago
Regarding coverage of new Amazon products...not sure whether we'd abandon that, I mean.
Bilal Hameed
· 2 years ago
I am proposing to abandon that as well. This will really make them feel the heat. Besides companies like smugmug have a lot at stake, it would be unfair to ask boycott from others, without paying due share.
I am fairly confident, we could get through with this.
Avi
· 2 years ago
We use Amazon S3 for our website and this lawsuit is very troubling.
Statsaholic you got my support.
James
· 2 years ago
You guys should get your facts straight. I have experimented with Alexa's web services in the past and found them useful.
This statsaholic product was not using the known Alexa API to there web services. Instead he was avoiding the cost of using them by some sort of scraping.
I have always paid for the use of Alexa's web services. Read google's terms of service (google maps), you are not supposed to make ANY money off your mashups. Alexa and Amazon WANT you to make money, but they also need you to support their costs hence the exorbitant (read sarcasm) $0.15 for 1,000 requests. I mean this is like using Amazons S3 service to store data, and not paying for it, how could we expect them to support that (without putting up ads or something)?
If this guy wanted to build the site, he could have, but he also could have paid for the use of the data. He bit the hand that feeds him and is getting what he deserves.
At least read Alexa's side of the story before you jump to conclusions.
"The Alexa Web Search Platform provides public access to the vast web crawl collected by Alexa Internet. Users can search and process billions of documents -- even create their own search engines -- using Alexa's search and publication tools. Alexa provides compute and storage resources that allow users to quickly process and store large amounts of web data. Users can view the results of their processes interactively, transfer the results to their home machine, or publish them as a new web service." - https://websearch.alexa.com
Erik
· 2 years ago
Silly thing to do, Alexa!
Bilal Hameed
· 2 years ago
Yes James we should have our facts straight and start paying Alexa taxes for using the same data that we guys help it generate.
And what took a billion dollar corp a whole year to sue a little guy ?
Jake
· 2 years ago
Amazon affiliate ads are now gone from my website.
James
· 2 years ago
Bilal-
Are you donating the disk space and cpu power to Alexa to have them hand out the information to Statsaholic?
If the answer is no, then Alexa has to pay for storage, bandwidth and cpu power. How would you suggest they do that?
All statsaholic had to do was do what everyone else who uses the Alexa API does, and pay the modest amount for the service (I do it, why should anyone else be exempt?)
Mark Devlin
· 2 years ago
Uh-oh. If he's not actually using the API then that's not good. I have been involved in these type of dramas before, and often they are not what they first appear. I should have found out more before posting my support so I'd like to remove my name from the petition, pernding further investigation.
Bilal: Alexa/Amazon is not a charity. They used their skills to collect user data. That data is an aggregate and does not belong to you, or to any other group of users. If they want to charge for it, that's their decision. It's not a tax if you have the choice not to pay it.
Pete Cashmore
· 2 years ago
James,
I can't speak for the developer, because he's currently embroiled in this lawsuit. But offers were supposedly made to pay for access at a higher price than the API fees and rejected.
This should have been settled by both parties just agreeing to a price for the data - claiming hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages is overkill. I was largely on Amazon's side until they went with the heavy handed approach.
James
· 2 years ago
Pete-
Alexa should not decide to allow some applications that use there api and disallow others.
If that is true, I might change my opinion. Right now it is He said She said stuff....
Note also that timing of this offer to pay more for the service would matter too, Statsaholic may have burned bridges...
Anyway I think it is useful to at least see the other side of the story.
Thanks for the info Pete!
James
Bilal Hameed
· 2 years ago
James NO, I dont donate the storage and CPU power to Alexa, but then I also dont donate storage and CPU power to Google for providing me Search.
Back in early 2006 I had to use Geocoding for European Countries in a project I was doing. From all the search companies with a local search property only Microsoft was providing Geocoding via its API for a subscription fees. Guess what, I didnt used it because at that time I didnt have had credit card. In about a month Google offered Geocoding Data for Europe for free. Although it was getting that data from companies like Mapquest and others for a fee.
You know whats the difference between MS and Google. MS makes a product and then thinks about how to get its users blood dry, by imposing all sorts of subscriptions and fees. Google makes a product and offers it for free and tries to be of value to users, and once it is of value it tries to monetize not by sucking its users dry but rather by serving ads.
So dear get over the MS mentality, it wont get you anywhere...
Pete Cashmore
· 2 years ago
James,
Yeah, I agree with the He said She said analysis. I don't put statsaholic totally outside of blame's way (in fact I think Ron may have fired them up a little bit by ducking the filters - even ZDnet says it was cat and mouse). But I do think a lawsuit is a step too far.
It's a bit like Photobucket vs MySpace - MySpace actually has a case, but they receive bad PR nonetheless. I don't think Alexa's lawsuit is totally meritless, but it is terrible PR for a company that's trying to promote itself as developer friendly, and pursuing this any further would be disastrous. Legitimate users of the API may be left with the impression that Amazon will resort to legal action if any dispute arises.
James
· 2 years ago
Bilal-
Note that you also cannot use most Google services to make money, legally that is. So if you were charging for (or making money from) your geoencoding service you were probably violating googles terms and conditions.
Maybe you're right and Alexa should have a business model where they advertise to make there money back. I have no idea if that would work.
But dear, not everything in life is free, especially if the service is designed to build a company around. Frankly if Statsaholic didn't like Alexa's business model they should have gone to someone else, not violated the terms and conditions of Alexa.
James
James
· 2 years ago
Pete-
Legal stuff should always be a last resort I agree.
Well we shall see, there is always the possibility of a settlement and something that could make everyone happy...
Anyhow sometimes a dissenting view is useful I think, sorry if I annoyed everyone.
dave mcclure
· 2 years ago
signing for petition.
Ashwin Bharambe
· 2 years ago
What a ridiculous lawsuit! It completely ruins the spirit of collaboration which Amazon itself is preaching.
Chris
· 2 years ago
James is on the right track and other people here don't seem to understand the situation.
Statsaholic is hotlinking images from Alexa. Isn't this a bad thing to do?
Amazon provides an API to get this data. Statsaholic could be using this service, but it is not.
The API costs money to use, similar to most of the other Amazon APIs. This is probably why Statsaholic is not using the API.
But since Amazon is using their resources to get the data in the first place, they should be free to charge whatever they want. Again this is similar to their other services.
Why is hotlinking images ok for Statsaholic to do?
Tom Clarke
· 2 years ago
Agreed. It was a great service and this just stinks of bully-boy tactics on Alexa's part.
Phil Butler
· 2 years ago
If a company cannot handle some good competition, it is likely a weak freak of nature. I agree, just have a beer and talk it over.
Web 2.0 is supposed to be about collaboration and connectedness, where is the example from Alexa here?
Andrey Fedorov
· 2 years ago
I'm a frequent Amazon shopper, but their lack of ethics as an organization troubles me... It's probably a good idea to contact them on their site to submit a complaint:
Adding my name to the petition: Amazon, you're biting the hand that help feed you. As an Amazon customer I'm willing to boycott your sites and products over this, it is beyond unacceptable, if anything, you should buy these folks, and laud them for the excellent job they've been doing.
Rick
· 2 years ago
Signing the petition. And I'm boycotting Amazon until they drop the lawsuit.
Joseph
· 2 years ago
Agree. Amazon has overdone it this time.
JDK B
· 2 years ago
bah. dumb move by Amazon. but I would like to hear a response from them.
Jason B Bogovich
· 2 years ago
In light of a company who's ideals support a mashup of the internet, you should have at least extended an offer to this small developer, what he was doing was making the web better, not doing something bad. Protect your assets without a forked toungue, offer to buy the company or extend a business relationship to them, your brand is your most important lawsuit and I think the value that it just lost would have covered the purchase of this company.
Jason Bogovich
· 2 years ago
What I meant to say is: In light of a company who’s ideals support a mashup of the internet, you should have at least extended an offer to this small developer, what he was doing was making the web better, not doing something bad. Protect your assets without a forked toungue, offer to buy the company or extend a business relationship to them, your brand is your most important asset and I think the value that it just lost would have covered the purchase of this company.
Greg Sterling
· 2 years ago
Bad Behavior
BikerDan
· 2 years ago
Booo Amazon! Viva la Boycot!
Ross
· 2 years ago
Pretty sad,
I'm going to have to look into using something else other than S3 which I have been happily using for a while now.
Matt Jaynes
· 2 years ago
Amazon: You are doing so great in so many other areas (AWS especially!). Please don't kill your community good-will with taking this lame approach with Statsaholic. Seriously, it's not a sucker's choice (sue or not sue) to resolve this - think creatively, there's a really great solution hidden in there somewhere!
Friday 13 horrors
· 2 years ago
I am linking through to an article that tells another sad story, how Amazon shut down their affiliate program to several popular websites w/o much explaining what is going on.
raj
· 2 years ago
So much for openness on the Internet. Not surprisingly, very shortly after Alexa levied lawsuit against Statsoholic, they suddenly had multi-domain comparison.
Some people just don't get what it means to release an API. It's not so that you can wait until someone else develops an application using your API, then you steal the idea from them by crying trademark violation or some such. Very disappointing.
Jason Cianchette
· 2 years ago
Statsaholic should avoid using the misleading and nearly useless Alexa data and Amazon should pick on someone their own size.
Thomas Janson
· 2 years ago
Over here in Germany I will spread the word.
techfold
· 2 years ago
Signing too!
Scott Brown
· 2 years ago
I support this petition.
Phil Butler
· 2 years ago
Discourse and debate is one great thing about Web 2.0. However, the validity of Web 2.0 is in question in so many areas now.
Hell, we can't even agree on a bad guy when we are apparently see one in action.
Google is wonderful and perfect, Digg is the place for news (whoooaaahahahaha!), MySpace is a community like a quaint little village in the Swiss Alps, and YouTube is the Web 2.0 equivalent of "I Love Freaking Lucy."
"Ricky, Ricky Fred has got his hand up my dress! Don't worry Luceeee, Fred is our neighbor!"
It is true, the relative allegations should be examined. Perhaps a boycott of Amazon until they either produce incontrovertible evidence that mean old Statsaholic harmed them?
The blososphere can be the jury. Give them 1 week to present the evidence, let Pete be the judge and we come back here and decide.
Now that would be Web 2.0!
techfold
· 2 years ago
Ok - this issue is getting confusing. I wrote a summary post about the AWIS blog post:
It emerged in comments however (see comments by James), that statsaholic was not using the Alexa API (which charges fees), but was instead scraping, or otherwise circumventing the API. James points readers to the Alexa Blog post on the topic in which Alexa takes issue with:
1. Trademark infringement via the “Alexaâ€holic name. Though Alexaholic has changed its name, Alexa points out that Statsaholic still redirects the Alexaholic domain to the new site - a remedy that is not satisfactory to Alexa. Personally, I think Alexa forfeited their rights to demand restitution from Statsaholic by allowing the use of the Alexaholic domain for years, and explicitly stating that they were aware of the Alexaholic, and supportive of it. Alexa should be content with the Statsaholic switch and call it a lesson learned on trademark protection. 2. Alexa also takes issue with Statsaholic’s use of graphs. The Alexa fee-based API (AWIS)does not include graphs - so statsaholic apparently (more-or-less) hotlinks them. This issue has the ring of legitimacy to it. The charts and the system to produce them consume resources, and the IP behind the charting system has value. If Statsaholic used paid AWIS data and their own charting engine, their wouldn’t be a problem. But it seems that Statsaholic is doing neither.
IN summary: (a) Statsaholic is entited to the Statsaholic name, and traffic from Alexaholic. (b) If Statsaholic is a viable business, it can afford to put out for its own chart rendering engine, and pay for use of AWIS data. To be honest, that sound preferable anyway - there’s a lot more opportunity to add value to data when you’re completely in control of presentation; and, that would give Statsaholic the opportunity to blend with data from other sources, creating a superior metric.
In any event, Alexa I don’t think Alexa needed to resort to litigation to get this ball rolling, but I don’t know both sides of the story. Pete C. suggests in response to James in comments that Alexa tried to up-charge Statsaholic, asking for more than the standard AWIS fees - is this substantiated?
Chris
· 2 years ago
In response to techfold, my reading of what Pete said is that the more expensive charge would be for the use of the graphs that have already been rendered.
Since this is not the service they provide via the API, it makes sense they would charge more for it for this one-off case.
Of course, if he uses the API, Amazon will not have a problem with that.
marooned
· 2 years ago
What amazon is trying to do to statsaholic is despicable beyond words.
:( :( :(
I wouldnt want to have to do anything with Amazon.com, if this is how it chooses to be.
Kevin Bondelli
· 2 years ago
I support Statsaholic and urge Amazon/Alexa to drop their ridiculous lawsuit.
Morgan Evans
· 2 years ago
I support this petition. Shameful behavior on Amazon's part. I'll think twice before shopping there again.
Ali
· 2 years ago
I agree, on with the boycott. Let the stats of all sites fall flat and then Alexa's data won't be viable anymore.
Kison
· 2 years ago
Agreed. Lay off.
Taryn
· 2 years ago
I think it's despicable that Alexa sues Alexaholic after stealing most of it's ideas.
Scott Duffy
· 2 years ago
Sorry Statsaholic fans. Alexa is right here.
James and techfold said it best. If someone is not willing to sell you something (access to their proprietary graphs), then you can't steal it by claiming you offered to pay.
Statsaholic should give up the alexaholic domain, and generate its own stats based on the Alexa API. If they survive this lawsuit that is.
Robert Vassar
· 2 years ago
Amazon is getting too big for it's own shoes. Time to ignore and boycott them.....what idiots!!!
Matthew Underbrink
· 2 years ago
Please drop the lawsuit. I am customer of Amazon, and a supporter of Alexa. What this developer did was not malicious in intent, and I am sure there are bigger things you have to deal with.
Amazon sux
· 2 years ago
Signed
Steve H
· 2 years ago
They NEED user input and small web2.0s - start biting them and youve cut your own veins open.
Well the only people who are going to drop being an amazon affiliate are the ones making zero money at it. It seems bad to me that they after going after him after encouraging him. I don't see how that will fly.
Dylan Mankey
· 2 years ago
Man, I thought Amazon was one of the good guys. I know big business will always do things we don't like, but the new generation of big tech companies seemed to be changing things for the better. However this lawsuit makes me wonder if Amazon is among those companies.
Paula
· 2 years ago
Shame on Amazon! Shame...shame....double shame! >.
Cecil McGregor
· 2 years ago
I can't believe Alexa would do something like this to someone who has obviously helped Alexa as much as Alexaholic! What am I missing in this story?
Is this another nail in the coffin of cooperative net building?
Monxi Garza
· 2 years ago
I agree with this petition completely. This law suit against Statsaholic is completely and utterly ridiculous. This mas was merely being helpful.
Stig Nordas
· 2 years ago
Amazon: Make a deal with Statsaholic, don't bury them in a lawsuit! How about just charging a fair licensing fee?
Larry Johnson
· 2 years ago
Amazon needs to back off. Till then no more purchases from their web site by me.
C. Meone
· 2 years ago
We have enough bullies at school, in Redmond, in Comcast/AOL/etc., and in Washington than to need one more with Alexa. However, since, according to the defendant Alexa only discriminates against him, he should have no problem defending himself.
Dan S
· 2 years ago
I support this petition. Amazon is really make itself look bad...everyone is talking.
Michael Gilligan
· 2 years ago
I support the petition and am boycotting Amazon.
Brian Lee
· 2 years ago
Does Amazon have retarded executives that don't understand web 2.0? I would think they would hire the guy (or buy his website - same thing) instead of suing him? All I know is that I'm a lot more apprehensive about using Amazon's services...
Theo S.
· 2 years ago
Amazon should drop this shameful case.
John Doe
· 2 years ago
Who cares? Alexa sucks and is wildly inaccurate.
Kevin P. Riley
· 2 years ago
Don't make the same stupid move that the RIAA does amazon. Suing people who you want to like you IS NOT A WISE BUSINESS DECISION.
casey
· 2 years ago
We use your tool often and wish you the best of luck. Until then I'm pulling may amazon.com shares to target.com.
Gary Pranzo
· 2 years ago
I guess no more Alexa or Amazon for me. I could see if their was some kind of business sense here but this is just bullying. Our lawyer is Bigger then yours.
Bob Foster
· 2 years ago
Totally agree. Bring on the boycott!
Viacheslav
· 2 years ago
Completely agreed. Graphs supplied by Alexa contain references to Alexa, which is free advertising for them. Beside the simple fact that they could've settled this with much simpler methods than going to court. Also - Boycott Alexa crawler: insert this into your robots.txt:
User-agent: ia_archiver Disallow: /
Paul Geromini
· 2 years ago
Sad
Dmitriy Kruglyak
· 2 years ago
Amazon, hands off Statsaholic!
Douglas Karr
· 2 years ago
Technorati does a pretty cool job of limiting the number of calls that you can make to its API on a daily basis. Rather than ridiculously suing Statsaholic, why doesn't Alexa simply throttle the calls and put a pay per call model in place to allow Statsaholic to continue to prosper AND financially benefit from the partnership.
Lending your tools to the neighbor and getting mad when he uses them better than you did is pretty childish.
Jack
· 2 years ago
Douglas:
The problem is that Statsaholic isn't actually USING the alexa API, though they could be. Statsaholic is deliberately avoiding using the alexa API to avoid paying the fees associated with its use, hence the lawsuit.
Jenn
· 1 year ago
Does anyone know if the case is still going on?
w_webmaster
· 1 year ago
We can judge the popularity of these sites by seeing their ranking in http://www.alexa.com/data/details/main?url=www.... Alexa. Orkut has been steadily rising on the Alexa charts but MySpace is still significantly bigger than Orkut.com.
All Comments
How about agreeing on a self imposed ban to not report any news pertaining to Amazon or ones in which Amazon is a party.
It wont hurt us, we would still have plenty of stuff to report, but it will surely make higher ups at Amazon shiver.
Think about it and let me know.
Fair enough. Not covering Alexa is easy...I don't trust their stats too much anyway (and I hope that statsaholic will add other stat providers for comparison).
Not sure what we'll do re:Amazon coverage.
I am fairly confident, we could get through with this.
Statsaholic you got my support.
This statsaholic product was not using the known Alexa API to there web services. Instead he was avoiding the cost of using them by some sort of scraping.
I have always paid for the use of Alexa's web services. Read google's terms of service (google maps), you are not supposed to make ANY money off your mashups. Alexa and Amazon WANT you to make money, but they also need you to support their costs hence the exorbitant (read sarcasm) $0.15 for 1,000 requests. I mean this is like using Amazons S3 service to store data, and not paying for it, how could we expect them to support that (without putting up ads or something)?
If this guy wanted to build the site, he could have, but he also could have paid for the use of the data. He bit the hand that feeds him and is getting what he deserves.
At least read Alexa's side of the story before you jump to conclusions.
http://awis.blogspot.com/2007/03/alexaholicstat...
I agree with you.
"The Alexa Web Search Platform provides public access to the vast web crawl collected by Alexa Internet. Users can search and process billions of documents -- even create their own search engines -- using Alexa's search and publication tools. Alexa provides compute and storage resources that allow users to quickly process and store large amounts of web data. Users can view the results of their processes interactively, transfer the results to their home machine, or publish them as a new web service." - https://websearch.alexa.com
And what took a billion dollar corp a whole year to sue a little guy ?
Are you donating the disk space and cpu power to Alexa to have them hand out the information to Statsaholic?
If the answer is no, then Alexa has to pay for storage, bandwidth and cpu power. How would you suggest they do that?
All statsaholic had to do was do what everyone else who uses the Alexa API does, and pay the modest amount for the service (I do it, why should anyone else be exempt?)
Bilal: Alexa/Amazon is not a charity. They used their skills to collect user data. That data is an aggregate and does not belong to you, or to any other group of users. If they want to charge for it, that's their decision. It's not a tax if you have the choice not to pay it.
I can't speak for the developer, because he's currently embroiled in this lawsuit. But offers were supposedly made to pay for access at a higher price than the API fees and rejected.
This should have been settled by both parties just agreeing to a price for the data - claiming hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages is overkill. I was largely on Amazon's side until they went with the heavy handed approach.
Alexa should not decide to allow some applications that use there api and disallow others.
If that is true, I might change my opinion. Right now it is He said She said stuff....
Note also that timing of this offer to pay more for the service would matter too, Statsaholic may have burned bridges...
Anyway I think it is useful to at least see the other side of the story.
Thanks for the info Pete!
James
Back in early 2006 I had to use Geocoding for European Countries in a project I was doing. From all the search companies with a local search property only Microsoft was providing Geocoding via its API for a subscription fees. Guess what, I didnt used it because at that time I didnt have had credit card. In about a month Google offered Geocoding Data for Europe for free. Although it was getting that data from companies like Mapquest and others for a fee.
You know whats the difference between MS and Google. MS makes a product and then thinks about how to get its users blood dry, by imposing all sorts of subscriptions and fees. Google makes a product and offers it for free and tries to be of value to users, and once it is of value it tries to monetize not by sucking its users dry but rather by serving ads.
So dear get over the MS mentality, it wont get you anywhere...
Yeah, I agree with the He said She said analysis. I don't put statsaholic totally outside of blame's way (in fact I think Ron may have fired them up a little bit by ducking the filters - even ZDnet says it was cat and mouse). But I do think a lawsuit is a step too far.
It's a bit like Photobucket vs MySpace - MySpace actually has a case, but they receive bad PR nonetheless. I don't think Alexa's lawsuit is totally meritless, but it is terrible PR for a company that's trying to promote itself as developer friendly, and pursuing this any further would be disastrous. Legitimate users of the API may be left with the impression that Amazon will resort to legal action if any dispute arises.
Note that you also cannot use most Google services to make money, legally that is. So if you were charging for (or making money from) your geoencoding service you were probably violating googles terms and conditions.
Maybe you're right and Alexa should have a business model where they advertise to make there money back. I have no idea if that would work.
But dear, not everything in life is free, especially if the service is designed to build a company around. Frankly if Statsaholic didn't like Alexa's business model they should have gone to someone else, not violated the terms and conditions of Alexa.
James
Legal stuff should always be a last resort I agree.
Well we shall see, there is always the possibility of a settlement and something that could make everyone happy...
Anyhow sometimes a dissenting view is useful I think, sorry if I annoyed everyone.
Statsaholic is hotlinking images from Alexa. Isn't this a bad thing to do?
Amazon provides an API to get this data. Statsaholic could be using this service, but it is not.
The API costs money to use, similar to most of the other Amazon APIs. This is probably why Statsaholic is not using the API.
But since Amazon is using their resources to get the data in the first place, they should be free to charge whatever they want. Again this is similar to their other services.
Why is hotlinking images ok for Statsaholic to do?
Web 2.0 is supposed to be about collaboration and connectedness, where is the example from Alexa here?
https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/contact-us/gener...
Viva la Boycot!
I'm going to have to look into using something else other than S3 which I have been happily using for a while now.
Some people just don't get what it means to release an API. It's not so that you can wait until someone else develops an application using your API, then you steal the idea from them by crying trademark violation or some such. Very disappointing.
Hell, we can't even agree on a bad guy when we are apparently see one in action.
Google is wonderful and perfect, Digg is the place for news (whoooaaahahahaha!), MySpace is a community like a quaint little village in the Swiss Alps, and YouTube is the Web 2.0 equivalent of "I Love Freaking Lucy."
"Ricky, Ricky Fred has got his hand up my dress! Don't worry Luceeee, Fred is our neighbor!"
It is true, the relative allegations should be examined. Perhaps a boycott of Amazon until they either produce incontrovertible evidence that mean old Statsaholic harmed them?
The blososphere can be the jury. Give them 1 week to present the evidence, let Pete be the judge and we come back here and decide.
Now that would be Web 2.0!
http://techfold.com/2007/04/20/what-is-the-real...
The meat of it is:
It emerged in comments however (see comments by James), that statsaholic was not using the Alexa API (which charges fees), but was instead scraping, or otherwise circumventing the API. James points readers to the Alexa Blog post on the topic in which Alexa takes issue with:
1. Trademark infringement via the “Alexaâ€holic name. Though Alexaholic has changed its name, Alexa points out that Statsaholic still redirects the Alexaholic domain to the new site - a remedy that is not satisfactory to Alexa. Personally, I think Alexa forfeited their rights to demand restitution from Statsaholic by allowing the use of the Alexaholic domain for years, and explicitly stating that they were aware of the Alexaholic, and supportive of it. Alexa should be content with the Statsaholic switch and call it a lesson learned on trademark protection.
2. Alexa also takes issue with Statsaholic’s use of graphs. The Alexa fee-based API (AWIS)does not include graphs - so statsaholic apparently (more-or-less) hotlinks them. This issue has the ring of legitimacy to it. The charts and the system to produce them consume resources, and the IP behind the charting system has value. If Statsaholic used paid AWIS data and their own charting engine, their wouldn’t be a problem. But it seems that Statsaholic is doing neither.
IN summary: (a) Statsaholic is entited to the Statsaholic name, and traffic from Alexaholic. (b) If Statsaholic is a viable business, it can afford to put out for its own chart rendering engine, and pay for use of AWIS data. To be honest, that sound preferable anyway - there’s a lot more opportunity to add value to data when you’re completely in control of presentation; and, that would give Statsaholic the opportunity to blend with data from other sources, creating a superior metric.
In any event, Alexa I don’t think Alexa needed to resort to litigation to get this ball rolling, but I don’t know both sides of the story. Pete C. suggests in response to James in comments that Alexa tried to up-charge Statsaholic, asking for more than the standard AWIS fees - is this substantiated?
Since this is not the service they provide via the API, it makes sense they would charge more for it for this one-off case.
Of course, if he uses the API, Amazon will not have a problem with that.
:( :( :(
I wouldnt want to have to do anything with Amazon.com, if this is how it chooses to be.
James and techfold said it best. If someone is not willing to sell you something (access to their proprietary graphs), then you can't steal it by claiming you offered to pay.
Statsaholic should give up the alexaholic domain, and generate its own stats based on the Alexa API. If they survive this lawsuit that is.
'Nuff said.
Is this another nail in the coffin of cooperative net building?
User-agent: ia_archiver
Disallow: /
Lending your tools to the neighbor and getting mad when he uses them better than you did is pretty childish.
The problem is that Statsaholic isn't actually USING the alexa API, though they could be. Statsaholic is deliberately avoiding using the alexa API to avoid paying the fees associated with its use, hence the lawsuit.