On the first Point I agree with Benjamin. US copyright law doesn't prevent
a magazine subscriber from paying someone to clip all the ads out of their
magazines before reading. I'm not sure it would prevent a firm from doing
this to the magazines themselves. They just can't print the articles again
without the ads (or with them for that matter).
On the second, I'm not sure there is even a violation of trademark. The nut
of trademark law is (1) do you capitalize on the brand name in sales or (2)
damage the brand through your use. Thus I can say my software is "Netscape
Navigator compatable" if I note the trademark of Netscape. I can't use
their logo and I might have problems marketing Tetscape Navigator because of
similarities (confusion to the buyer) and weakening their brand (causing
damage to their intangible property). If my software needs to ID itself as
Mozilla to accomplish compatability then I may do that without fear, because
I'm not using Mozilla for my marketing or to establish any sort of brand
identity.
Finally, with apologies to the group, writing agents is not *that* difficult
[good agents, yes. agents, no]. I wrote a VB app that grabs quotes off the
internet and runs them across my screen on a ticker. I have several choices
of places to get quotes, some of them have ads on the page. It took four
hours and I'm not proud. There is already a VB freewhere app that gets
html from the net. Soon there will be agent toolkits in the pipe. The
commercial search engines might be able to harrass big ticket software
houses, but the hobbyist/shareware market is pretty difficult to intimidate.
Currently good searches take time and pages (thus giving lots of eyeball
time). If search engine X gave me what I wanted on the first page [see
magic thread of past], then I would use that engine exclusively. This gives
them a bump in market share but reduces the number of adds seen by me. If I
advertise based on presentations, what is the incentive to pay more for
space on the better search engine?
Terry