I would guess they did so in the same way that google asks every website operator before crawling and caching. (I.e., I suspect they didn't come to any explicit agreement. If google doesn't, why should they need to?)
This is probably the wrong attitude towards founding startups. In general, you shouldn't unnecessarily risk the business -- but if people are throwing roadblocks in your way, lots of startups seem to generally do pretty well when they play fast-and-loose with rules. The logic is that nobody's going to bother to sue you until you get big and can defend yourself. Obviously taking a big risk like this isn't ideal, but you shouldn't let it stop you from moving forward with a business.
“Listings are currently sourced from several delearship websites by means of crawling and extracting relevant content available on the host application. If you are a dealer wishing to list and/or promote your inventory on Demanjo, we can help you drive qualified, local shoppers to your dealership.”
and “The selection and placement of listings on this page, except featured listings, were determined automatically by a computer program. For premium placement, please contact us.”
Yep and as I worked on sites for a big Audi dealer in the past they would not be happy giving stuff to scrapers as opposed to getting the lead direct.
BTW for information in the UK a lead for our Audi B2C site was worth around £60.
Sounds dodgy from a Google perspective republishing other peoples content - though I know that Google looked at doing a niche car product - like they have with hotels etc so might not be a viable long term business.
Do you know of any good articles demonstrating the repercussions of violating a ToS vs. violating a copyright?
I'm guessing violating a copyright is more likely to result in aggressive legal action whereas a ToS violation would just get you banned from the service or sent some sort of cease and desist.
yeah its a bit of a grey area I suspect that the big players don't want to be the first one to start legal proceedings - they want some one else to pull the trigger.
I used to work for Reed Elsevier and there was rampant scrapeing and plagiarizing going on usually to create crappy MFA sites or to insert middlemen (offering no social value) into the job board market.
I possibly could see EU based recruitment companies going after indeed - maybe if stepstone are up for a fight.
Matt Cutts whats the deal on allowing indeeds search results into your index I thought you did not like other se results in Googles index