Auction site closes door on 'spider'

By RICHARD WOOD

The online auction site Trade Me has demanded that Tradewise stop collecting information from its site.

Tradewise is a web site which consolidates auction listings from a number of New Zealand web sites, including Trade Me, Trade & Exchange, and Bidz.

Trade Me has told Tradewise to "cease and desist" by 5pm tomorrow.

Trade Me owner Sam Morgan said one concern he had was the effect the Tradewise site had on the performance of Trademe from the process of "spidering" the Trade Me site.

Spidering involves automatically collecting information from a web site.

Tradewise's program grabs detailed information on each individual auction and presents it in its own structure.

Tradewise owner Joanne Martin did not answer a call from the Herald but defended the site in a statement.

She said Tradewise was doing what search engines such as Google or Yahoo did to produce a search engine capability.

She said it benefited the New Zealand trading community, and had been well received by its visitors.

"Its close will impair the options of serious traders."

She also said Trade Me could use a "robots" file to exclude Tradewise from spidering its site, a course of action Morgan said he might take.

Morgan said that what Tradewise did was different to search engines linking to pages because that usually involved only a headline and summary.

"What Tradewise is doing is replicating the full value of the site."

Auckland barrister Chris Patterson said there had been international litigation in this area, involving Ebay and Ticketek, around copyright and the issue of "electronic trespass".

Patterson said that on the web there could be an implied licence to use information from another site.

But sending a letter, as Trade Me has done to Tradewise, was similar to a trespass notice.

He said the impact on the web servers being spidered was used in the Ebay case to establish damages according to the amount of server time used.

"The argument is quite sound and simple. Trade Me owns a web server and it is entitled to say who can use its web server and who can't. It is saying to Tradewise you can't use our server for this purpose."

Morgan thinks there are also issues of copyright. He said Trade Me had put a lot of work into creating its content.

The Tradewise site was developed by contract programmer Brett Waterson, who owns Bidz, a competitor to Trade Me, through his company Helix Data Solutions

Waterson said he was the programming "brains" behind Tradewise, but the business belonged to Martin, his sister.

Trade Me

Trade Wise

Bidz