On the Web, innovative data reuse yields opportunities — and legal questions.
An increasing number of Internet applications take advantage of the large amount of data accessible via the Web. These applications — now often called “mashups” — make relevant information from multiple Web sites easily accessible at a single Web site. For example, back in the late 1990s, a company called Bidder’s Edge Inc. allowed users to search and compare auction data for more than 5 million items from more than 100 auction sites, such as eBay Inc. and many others, as easily as the user could search one auction site. Currently, Kayak.com lets a user compare airfares by searching numerous travel sites to find the best fares available. With such applications, a user no longer needs to visit multiple sites and manually compare data; the applications do that automatically. They extract and reuse relevant Web data, often in very innovative ways, to make the information more valuable to the user.
As Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the Web, said in an interview published in Technology Review in 2004, “the exciting thing is serendipitous reuse of data: one person puts data up there for one thing, and another person uses it another way.