The legality of meta search engines and mashup sites

[Kristijntje]

Ever since the launch of Lancebot.com, we get the occasional inquiry questioning the legality of the services offered by this site. Lancebot is a tool that aggregates freelance job openings from multiple sources and provides a searchable interface to them. There was a decent amount of controversy a while back surrounding the case of Oodle, an online job aggregator, that got ousted from CraigsList, the popular community of classified ads.

Do the same principles put forth by CraigsList apply here, and is Lancebot infringing on the copyright of the sites it scrapes? We don't think so, as we will try to explain below. Nonetheless, given the confusion that abounds, we are pushed to write this disclaimer to clarify...

full article: http://www.lancebot.com/disclaimer.jsp