Re:Ruling in favor of Ebay may benefit us (Score 1)

As noted in a previous post, there are technical solutions to the problem of "I want to give information to party A, but not party B". A business that spends money on coders and servers but not on decent network management staff is just stupid (or would be if our judicial system made more sense).

The "referrer" tag solves the outside linking problem. If a site was concerned about automated searches, it surely wouldn't be that hard to record the number of times it had been accessed from a particular domain and then bounce requests after a certain point. Hell, you might even be able to convince your upstream provider to bounce such requests, as they are at least as annoying as spam.

The world in general, and the U.S. in particular, would be better off if we closed down about half the law schools and used the proceeds to pay for more system administration/network management training. If "judicial restraint" was a phrase with any meaning, the courts whould have ruled that the web wasn't in their jurisdiction a long time ago. Sure, large companies might have hesitated to invest resources in huge sprawling websites at least until the knew what they were doing in a technical sense, but would that really have been a Bad Thing? Lawyers and judges are economically in the same industry however, and expanded jurisdiction means more work for all of them.