Comment by frig | Hacker News Reader

Comment by frig | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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