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At 8:40 AM -0500 8/14/03, Bullard, Claude L (Len) wrote:
>Yes. Only I can't think of any reason eBay or Google
>would raise a lawyer's paranoia quotient. eBay goes
>to great lengths to police the actions of it's users.
>Google just relies on a PageRank algorithm (possibly
>patented) that is an opinion meter and even if it
>seems odd, it also works for most topics.
eBay has massive exposure due to auction fraud. They also have big
problems with the sale of forbidden items in various jurisdictions.
(e.g. Nazi memorabilia in France, pornography in Kentucky, etc.)
Paypal's under investigation for failing to adhere to various states'
banking legislation and could serve as a conduit for money
laundering. Google (or any search engine really) has massive
copyright exposure due to caching of pages. Fortunately, these
companies didn't let any of this stop them. If you're successful
enough, the penalties for this, both direct and indirect, are simply
a cost of doing business. Napster's real failure was that they got
hit with legal action before they had a large enough revenue stream
to cope.
--
Elliotte Rusty Harold
elharo@metalab.unc.edu
Processing XML with Java (Addison-Wesley, 2002)
http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xmljava
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0201771861/cafeaulaitA
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