There is a new service on the Internet horizon, which at first glance looks like a SEO gem, and a small businesses dream in keeping their web site fresh with new content. However upon a closer and more cynical look through legal eyes, this service needs to be used very carefully to extract the benefit without infringing on an other’s web site copyright. It should be pointed out that the United States Copy Right Act as amended in 1998, and the web site equivalent the Digital Millennium Act of 2000, provides for severe monetary penalties for intentional copyright infringement, which could exceed $150,000 in statutory fines without even needing to prove any damages.

This new service is a form of content scrapping, without the need for the original content developer to provide for an RSS feed. Dapper, created this new service which makes it easy to extract content from any website. According to Dapper’s marketing shpeal, the service allows you to create a "black box" for any data source on the Internet. This data is then converted into an XML feed which you can use programmatically in whatever way you like. Moreover, Dapper allows you to change this XML into other formats both textually and through images and Google maps.

“Dapper provides a point and click GUI to extract data from any web site that can then be worked with and displayed via XML, HTML, RSS, email alerts, Google Maps, Google Gadgets, a JavaScript image loop or JSON.” http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/08/17/create-an-api-for-any-site-with-dapper/

The idea is great, where a web site owner can keep their site fresh by adding new content every time another web site updates theirs. This is very much like an RSS feed, which is not only legal, but encouraged by many content providers, as a way to generate backlinks and as a way to establish those content providers as the authority on a particular subject. However, you do need to know some very basic programming in order to bring an RSS feed into your site. If you are the content provider and are not using a blog or automatic RSS syndication service, you may need to know quite a bit more about programming in XML, to create those helpful RSS feeds. The Dapper service will eliminate the need to create RSS, so that a site owner can more easily allow their content to be syndicated without the need to put it in a blog format.

What is the problem? Not all web site owners want their content syndicated, or even copied on another web site. In addition, the search engines do a great job in not accessing a duplicate content penalty to those who use RSS feeds, but how will the engines see this technology. One might suspect that the engines will not see this technology as friendly as an RSS feed, where the content owner has made their content available to copy. It certainly leaves the door open for anyone to grasp photos, videos, and original creative works and display it on their own site without even asking permission of the content owner. This by its very essence is intentional copyright infringement. With that said, a simple email or phone call might be all that you need to protect yourself, though as they say, “if it isn’t in writing, it didn’t happen”. It will be interesting to see how the Dapper technology moves forward.

The above blog was written by Mike Goldstein, SEO Manager at Rock Coast Media.