[yp_all]

Pot calling the kettle black.

Crawling others' websites then selling ads. <--- Blekko

Scraping others' websites then selling ads. <--- ????

Selling access to user-generated content. <--- OSVDB

Amusing to watch these folks argue about ethics.

Who owns the copyrights in this data? Surely not the one who is demanding that you pay a license fee. These "services" are middlemen, plain and simple.

This might be why McAfee was wondering about how much manual curation is done.

Maybe that is the only possible theory of how OSVDB could assert any rights in the data (and only in a select few jurisdictions).

[scott_karana]

If they're a middleman, and it's such an easy "service", why didn't McAfee just bypass them and get the data from the original sources, rather than do the wrong thing?

[yp_all]

That's a valid question and one I have considered myself.

So what drives the folks at McAfee to do this?

Maybe it is the same thinking that drives programnmers to not want to write code.

"Don't reinvent the wheel."

"Code reuse."

"Use a shared library or a scripting language with batteries included."

Why crawl the web when Google has already done it for you?

And so on.

Personally, I do not have trouble understanding why McAfee would do this.

What I have trouble understanding is why OSVDB would think they could crawl some public data and then charge a fee to access it.

It is the "sale" of "free" information that puzzles me.

By all means go ahead and try, you may well recoup your outlays for compiling the free data and even make a profit.

But should we really be surprised when someone does not want to pay?