Anyone have any legal/ethical input on this idea?

[LMSInc.]

I got an idea for a site which would essentially scrape and index forum posts and display then in search results, but formatted within the site, with a link back to the source of the content. Without giving away my idea, let's pretend I wanted to create an auto repair website which would scrape and index content from forums, in which people could search the site for their issue, and see what others have done to solve the issue.

Obviously, there would be advertising on the site for revenue.

I feel like this would be blatant theft, which sucks because for the niche, I think this idea is great.

I'm just looking to see what some of you have to say.

Thanks in advance, and here are some tits as a thank you.

 

[VedoMedia]

already done lots of times....

 

[juntao65]

Yeah I see a lot of this shit all over. Some of them even pretend to be the original forum. Can't say much from a legal standpoint (should check with aaronklaw or mont), but as for ethics.... there's ethics in IM?

 

[Andrew Scherer]

 

[GerardWon]

unoriginal idea is unoriginal idea

 

[d_diggler]

Search for anything related to a 'how to' tech question and you'll find hundreds of such sites.

 

[dmnEPC]

http://i.imgur.com/2e4sR.jpg[/IMG]

I really love how "vulnerable" this chick looks or maybe its just the goosebumps.

As to the OP type in any "How to" question in google and the 1st page is full of guys already doing the same thing your describing so might as well stop thinking about this idea and move on to something else

 

[-joe-]

No idea from a legal standpoint, but to state the obvious - you're gonna have a lot of issues getting indexed by Google.

 

[JCash]

I think there's definitely a need for a good forum search engine, and as long as you honor robots.txt and don't provide complete mirrors of forums (just contextual excerpts) there's not much legal or ethical peril.