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In Chapter 27 you read about website polices, robots.txt files, robots meta tags, and other tools server administrators use to regulate webbots and spiders. It's important to remember, however, that obeying a webmaster's webbot restrictions does not absolve webbot developers from responsibility. For example, even if a webbot doesn't find any restrictions in the website's Terms of Service agreement, robots.txt file, or meta tags, the webbot developer still doesn't have permission to violate the website's intellectual property rights or use inordinate amounts of the webserver's bandwidth.

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[80] This estimate of the number of websites on the Internet as of February 2006 comes from http://news.netcraft.com/archives/web_server_survey.html.

[81] If you interfere with the operation of one site, you may also affect other, non-targeted websites if they are hosted on the same (virtual) server.

Copyright

One way to keep your webbots out of trouble is to obey copyright, the set of laws that protects intellectual property owners. Copyright allows people and organizations to claim the exclusive right to use specific text, images, media, and control the manner in which they are published. All webbot developers need to have an awareness of copyright. Ignoring copyright can result in banishment from websites and even lawsuits.

Do Consult Resources

Before you venture off on your own (or assume that what you're reading here applies to your situation), you should check out a few other resources. For basic copyright information, start with the website of the United States Copyright Office, http://www.copyright.gov. Another resource, which you might find more readable, is http://www.bitlaw.com/copyright, maintained by Daniel A. Tysver of Beck & Tysver, a firm specializing in intellectual property law. Of course, these websites only apply to US laws. If you're outside the United States, you'll need to consult other resources.

Don't Be an Armchair Lawyer

Mitigating factors and varying interpretations affect copyright law enforcement. There seems to be an exception to every rule. If you have specific questions about copyright law, the smartest thing to do is to consult an attorney. Since the Internet is relatively new, intellectual property law—as it applies to the Internet—is somewhat fluid and open to interpretation. Ultimately, courts interpret the law. While it is not within the scope of this book to cover copyright in its entirety, the following sections identify common copyright issues that webbot developers may find interesting.

Copyrights Do Not Have to Be Registered

In the United States, you do not have to officially register a copyright with the Copyright Office to have the protection of copyright laws. The US Copyright office states that copyrights are granted automatically, as soon as an original work is created. As the Copyright Office describes on its website:

Copyright is secured automatically when the work is created, and a work is "created" when it is fixed in a copy or phonorecord for the first time. "Copies" are material objects from which a work can be read or visually perceived either directly or with the aid of a machine or device, such as books, manuscripts, sheet music, film, videotape, or microfilm. "Phonorecords" are material objects embodying fixations of sounds (excluding, by statutory definition, motion picture soundtracks), such as cassette tapes, CDs, or LPs. Thus, for example, a song (the "work") can be fixed in sheet music ("copies") or in phonograph disks ("phonorecords"), or both. If a work is prepared over a period of time, the part of the work that is fixed on a particular date constitutes the created work as of that date.[82]

Notice that online content isn't specifically mentioned in the above paragraph, while there are specific references to original works "fixed in copy" through books, sheet music, videotape, CDs, and LPs. While there is no specific mention of websites, one may assume that references