Comment by frig | Hacker News Reader

Comment by frig | Hacker News Reader

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Try to read faster than your knee can jerk. quoted from page 2 of the article:

The Client Protection Fund of the Bar of Maryland, the state's legal licensing body, provides Avvo with information for 34,000 lawyers, including the name, address and date of admittance to practice in the state. Avvo pays a standard fee for the agency to produce the list. So far, none of Maryland's members have complained, according to the bar's administrator.

A shiny virtual nickel to someone who shows me how to quote text on this website.

Edit: it's unclear how the directory of DC Bar (as opposed to Maryland bar) was obtained and what specific claim the DC Bar is alleging.

As a general rule within the USA there's no copyright in raw facts (themselves), though there is in any presentation of said facts.

Thus if AVVO got a printed copy of the DC Bar's printed members' directory and then hired some people to type it up, they'd be fine.

Where they might not be fine is if the DC Bar had some kind of terms-of-use on their site that says "you can't use this site except for personal use" and then the DC Bar could show that Avvo obtained the information via the website.

The first point seems to be true: http://www.dcbar.org/copyright.cfm

(for background: http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.dcbar.org/copyright.... )

The second point -- whether or not the Avvo obtained their listings via the site or not -- is clearly a point of contention.

Given the previous willingness to legally obtain the listing (even paying actual money) I'd be surprised if the Avvo founders haven't dotted their i's and crossed their t's on this one.

Yes, that was what I was getting at.

Paragraph 4 from the article:

"This has nothing to do with obstructing access to information," said the bar's spokeswoman, Cynthia Kuhn. "It has to do with a commercial company taking this information without authorization and in some cases perpetuating misinformation" by not updating the data frequently enough."

Now, whether or not they have a case remains to be seen. Their willingness to pay for some of their data bodes well for Avvo, agreed. But the original commenter was painting this story as if it was about an organization trying to limit public information a la realtors with housing info.

That may be the case. But my comment was meant to point out that the other side is arguing that this is a case about theft and misuse of proprietary data.

But now we come full circle:

The underlying data: not proprietary (do you really think membership in the DC Bar, of all things, is "proprietary"?).

The presentation of said data on the DC Bar website: presentation is proprietary, data is still not.

But additionally: DC Bar says "if you get this information via this venue, then you're accepting our terms of use which say you can't use the information obtained via this venue to, eg, compile an AVVO-like site."

So on the face of it: only if Avvo is crazy-stupid will Avvo get burned here: the only scenarios in which Avvo gets burned are somewhere between

(a) the DC Bar can show suspicious access patterns that either come from Avvo or come at suspicious times vis-a-vis Avvo's updates

(b) Avvo doesn't have any internal documentation demonstrating from whence they obtained the information that's ticking off the DC Bar (ie: we paid some dudes to re-type the relevant phonebook sections, or paid some dudes to re-type the printed member's directory, etc.)

So the whole thing is pretty silly (at least until more facts emerge).

Edit: Because without some mix of (a) and (b), the DC Bar is ultimately going to have to claim something like "there's no possible way they could have gotten that information besides misusing our site", which I doubt would play well.

Whether or not the underlying data is proprietary is a matter for the courts to decide. One side says it is, the other says it's not.

As for whether or not that argument would play well, I don't know, I'm not a lawyer. I merely want to point out that the DC bar is trying to make this into a "they're stealing our data" case while the Avvo guys are trying to make this into a "they're just being lame" case.

I've done some digging, this is actually an interesting case.

Here's from a few weeks back:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/feb/17/dc-bar-fight...

It's worth reading for details.

Bystander verdict:

- there's almost no conceivable way the data in question is proprietary (beneficiary: avvo)

- it's established avvo got their info by scraping the dc bar's website (beneficiary: dc bar)

- after seeing that avvo was scraping them, a terms of service got put up prohibiting said scraping, but avvo didn't quit scraping until receiving a cease-and-desist (beneficiary: dc bar)

But summary-for-the-lazy is almost unchanged:

- underlying data not proprietary (essentially: public records)

- avvo obtained public records from a source that didn't want avvo using them the way avvo did (point of fact now)

Even the quotes from the DC Bar support this:

taking this information without authorization

If it was "their" information 'this' would -> 'our' for more impact; prepared quotes tend to be vetted.

No predictions how this turns out.

My personal hope is that Avvo loses, not because I think the bar is great, but because I'm sick of seeing startups scrape their way to victory and that seems like their business plan. I'm all for opening up information about lawyers, but I'm not for doing it by stealing data someone else paid to gather.

(Full disclosure -- I work at Avvo. Not a lawyer, but I do work with a lot of them.)

In this case, it's the other way around -- the DC lawyers must register with (and pay) the bar association in order to be allowed to practice in the district. The registration and disciplinary information is public data, but the bar association is usually the only organization that actually holds the data (since they were the ones who collected it in the first place). So, in many cases, including this one, the only way to get this public information is by going through the bar.

We went through something similar about a year ago in New Jersey. The AP article has fallen into the archives, but the Seattle PI wrote a blog post about it: http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/venture/archives/135524.a...

Hi there. Welcome to the discussion.

Question: Why did Avvo scrape the DC bar's web site after the TOS was changed to prohibit them from doing it?

I'm the wrong person to ask about it -- I didn't work on either the business or technical side of bar data collection, so I don't know exactly how often or when or how it was done.

I do know that if the DC bar provided this public data to people and companies directly, like most of the other other state bars have, this wouldn't be an issue. Unfortunately, the only provider of the data is the bar's own website, so retrieving the data directly from the site is the only real option. Terms of use may or may not change whether that's ok, but we'll have to wait and see what happens.

The other option is to not have the data on Avvo.

A shiny virtual nickel to someone who shows me how to quote text on this website.

http://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc

5¢

one paragraph

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  code here -> (((lisp (((((sucks))))) )))

hmm italics

* no italics

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