For those who didn’t notice- the copyright “war” of job posting information has begun. I wrote an article last week about the matter whether or not vertical job search engines have the legal right to pull posting content from sites. In preparation for such a dispute at least one of the major posting sources has begun to note that jobs cannot be reposted elsewhere. By doing so they have reaffirmed the legal copyright within the posting itself. Should it go to court I would be hard pressed to believe that the originating company would retain complete copyright over the job post. As you can clearly see below the job postings on Craiglist clearly have both a copyright notice and a secondary notice saying reposting is not OK (for those people who need plain english copyright)

Here is a screenshot of what I’m talking about from Craiglist

I’m with many people on the fact that this has been a long time coming and that there are going to be some huge changes. Verticle search of the recruiting sphere will revolutionize the industry. Verticle search is going to change a lot of industries. One way or another it will define things through a spectrum of new ideas and new legal pratices. But this whole search craze is going to get very messy.

In regard to that idea- I have a few questions on the impact to the recruiting industry and sites that have a membership or an advertising model.

1- Why would they fight vertical search engines taking away large advertising revenue streams-

2- Without them to serve as nexus point for specific industries- where are the vertical search companies going to draw from?

3- What prevents a verticle search company from being vertically searched itself?

4- If a verticle search company has pulled a one sentance, is it infringement? What about a paragraph? or the first three paragraphs?

Aside from those questions and as a comparison to other industries- these questions deal more with the facet of how far the term “search” can go before it is infringing on copyright. Google Library has made deals with several physical libraries to begin indexing and scanning physical books so they can be searched online. This seems very infringing as I can’t go into a music store and upload every soundtrack and allow previews of every cd without express permission of the artist/recording label.

1- As a specific case, wouldn’t Google Library need to buy a copy of every copyrighted book before they can index it?

2- As an individual I cannot go into a bookstore and start scanning copies of books (even if it’s for “indexing” purposes), why would a business be treated differently?

3- Since it hasn’t been legally defined yet by court rulings, at what point is search acceptable? Does it stop at the title, the author, the intro chapter, the first six chapters?

In some aspects the metacrawling of job posting data and allowing verticle search is encroaching on several of these gray areas of the law as well.

If I really wanted to have my writing or my job position spread across the web I would make it in a format to do so. Anyone heard of an RSS Feed? I have one on this blog and it’s commonly accepted that if I want my material spread out across the web the author has enabled it to be done. You can also check out the new RSS recruiting.com feed. I don’t see a RSS feed on Craiglist, in fact I see just the opposite.