Copyright infringement from quickbrowse?

[chrisheng]

Hi,

Does anyone know anything about quickbrowse.com?
Their site seems to be loading the images from one
of my sites fairly regularly without loading any of
the HTML pages (ie, the web logs show them as
the referrer for the images but no pages).

It looks possible that they're caching my HTML pages
on their server (copyright infringement?) without my
permission.

Chris.

[PaulKroll]

They appear to be taking, say, three different web pages and combining them to render a final, really long page.

Aside from my first impression, which is "there's another bundle of cash down the drain for some clueless VC investing in a totally useless .com", I suspect if you read through the site and talk to your lawyer, he/she will be able to send a really settling letter to them telling them in no uncertain terms that they're not welcome to do this. Of course, this isn't legal advice because I'm not a lawyer.

And of course, you can block their access to your site: do some searches here for "bandwidth theft" for relevant info.

[janderk]

I would just block their IP or protect your images from being fetched by another site. A htaccess modification should do the job.

Jan Derk

[Matt]

I have visited quickbrowse.com. From the little that I read,[nbsp][nbsp]my impression is that they download your pages and forward the info to a user. Perhaps they are caching the HTML pages and re-loading the images from your server as needed. I think it would be a bit rash to jump to the conclusion that it is copyright infringement. You could block access to their site as Paul Kroll and Jan Derk suggest, but the web site gives the impression that pages are loaded by user request. This means that if 100 users access your site from separate IPs, everything looks fine and good. But if those same 100 users sign up for the quickbrowse service and never physically visit your site, you will see what appears to be a huge amount of traffic all coming from one IP. If this is the case, then quickbrowse might actually reduce your bandwidth requirements (by caching the HTML). It might also increase them if their servers are poorly implemented.

So, is it illegal to run a cache server? Is it illegal to download your site every minute for backup? I would guess that it isn't. As the person paying for the bandwidth though, I can see how you are concerned. If you are seeing a gigantic hit from quickbrowse.com, by all means, block it. You are under no obligation to provide service to their servers or users, but keep in mind, some of those users may also be visitors to your site.

-Matt

[chrisheng]

Thanks for your replies. I'm still investigating the matter.
Well, actually, I'm going through my logs to find out the
User Agent (and the IP address(es) of that agent) that
they use to collect the pages onto their server.

I have not yet decided what to do yet, since Matt has a
valid point about users requested for those pages.
Nonetheless, caching of my pages is done, which I dislike,
since I did not give permission for this to be done. Neither
does there appear to be a way to disable caching
(the way Google allows caching to be disabled for
sites who don't like that - Google respects the robots.txt
file and the robots META tag).

Hmm... Quickbrowse also allows your pages to be fetched
daily (according to the user's settings), which may add up
to a site's bandwidth unnecessarily (since pages don't
change daily on every site)...

I'll post here when I've made some decisions (and
found out more). (Assuming I can get some time to do
this, this weekend.)

Chris.

[Jeff]

What I don't like about their "service" is that things might be broken by thier methods and visitors may just assume it is your fault.

For example, on one of my sites I noticed that a javascript random image loader didn't work when "assembled" by their engine (probably because it is trying to load the image with a relative path and it doesn't exist on their server and they don't go through and add the URL to the relative path in this case).[nbsp][nbsp]Another site has a flash movie which redirects when finished to a relative URL, so when viewed through their "mega page" it results in a 404 error.[nbsp][nbsp]Another page of mine uses three frames and appears blank after they reassemble it.[nbsp][nbsp]I suppose I can do more work so that all (their) errors are fixed when they leach my content, but I don't really like the idea of others being to re-present my layout without insuring that everything works.