Copyright “Fair Use”- Is stealing jobs accepted?

I’ve been trying to find some court decisions regarding how some search engines are posed to target specific niches and make a monopoly on certain aspects of posting jobs online (or other net related industries). This train of thought was originally brought up a month or so ago with various ideas regarding the .jobs domain and with some of the other vertical markets the big search engines have been stepping into lately. It was further encouraged by Joel Cheesman’s commentary on Yahoo doing some vertical search on other job boards.

I have yet to find anything that points towards this not completely breaking United States copyright law. Job postings, like any other creative writing- is copyrighted the moment it is published.

This is fairly straightforward- Depending on the particular situation you can sometimes use part of another’s material in your own work assuming that your work transforms the copyrighted material (in this case the job post) into something original and creative. This could include commentary, a creative work, a parody of the work, or a simple political and/or corporate statement. In Yahoo’s case it brings up a whole list of issues with companies “vertically searching” job boards and including the entirety of the original post.

If my site derives an income from offering job postings to visitors and by selling advertising to visitors who are looking at the postings- a company is seriously infringing on my profits when they take a job posting on my system, cut out the original advertising material and links around it, and present it in a “vertical search engine”.

I’m not saying that Yahoo has done anything illegal here. They may indeed have full permission from some job boards to pull data from them. Beyond monetary compensation for the loss of audience such practices by giants such as Yahoo severely impact the ability for a smaller site to make a name for itself. Is this a true instance of the online world allowing some of the “big boys” to create true monopolies by simply absorbing content from other sites?

This issue has also been a severe handicap of the .jobs domain that has not been addressed. One of the “strengths” of the .jobs domain was that it would be easier to locate the specific recruitment data and present it on vertical search engines. Some search companies are looking at technology to go in and pull data from postings in the .jobs domain, but the reality is that there will be a good number of companies that don’t want to be indexed. Even if it doesn’t directly detract from the revenue of my company, as a business owner I may choose that I don’t want to have my company’s job opening presented on a national site. Perhaps I have made a decision to only advertise to local candidates or that I want my company’s attitude and culture to be conveyed through the company website I spent huge amounts of money developing. What if I just don’t like the big job search engines?

Google recently had some similar issues with copyright items concerning the “Google cache” effect. Some small websites had content they didn’t want up anymore (or didn’t have the right to have in the first place) and they took it down. Since some services like Google cache common pages you may be interested in- this meant that a visitor to your site could actually end up looking at information that wasn’t on your site anymore. If the original information was yours- Google was infringing on your copyright. If it was originally someone else’s (and they asked you to remove it)- you could have done the right thing and removed it promptly and Google is still sending it out against your better wishes.

You can read what the U.S. Copyright Office says about copyright fair use: http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl102.html

Jobster led me down and setting my brain on the Jobster slogan of “great people with great opportunities”- I took a serious and hard look at various marketing and technical ideas in relation to the online recruitment world.

In the past two to five years huge numbers of recruiters turned to online job posting services and believed the online boards were the “holy grail” of finding better candidates. At first only the technically savvy candidate applied and this was a good pay-off for all the technical openings of the late 90’s. But as the mainstream consumer moved online, the resume spam often found in print classified ads was quickly behind.

This time it was multiplied by a hundred-fold and today some recruiters would rather just hit the delete button. Complex systems of keyword tools and online sorting methodologies invade the interview process and candidates that could be a great fit are accidentally set aside in favor of those candidates who had the right keyword.

In essence, the job boards took the “human” out of human resources. Without the personal interaction and a quick conversation about where you want to go and how you want to get there, the millions of resumes online have become a catalogue of library books that no one has read. Apparently lost in isles of resumes- there isn’t one librarian who can tell you which one is the best book to read.

This has caused a severe dis-joining of the human element. Previously candidates needed to submit a resume to a recruiter and that recruiter was responsible for categorizing your skills and your objectives with that of the company. Now many companies are spending millions on having a computers sort through the candidates and the “system” is losing the touch of the human interaction element.

This can be fixed, but I’m amazed so far that no one besides Jobster seems to be venturing down this path. You can read more about some of the ideas they are trying to encourage on the Jobster Blog. Perhaps some other companies will tackle this industry with some innovative technical know-how too.