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The Impact of Legal Challenges on the Evolution of Web-based Intelligent Agents (2008)

Abstract
Shopbots and Metabots are two Web-based intelligent agents that emerged since 1994 with the popularity of the Web. Both agent categories experienced impacts from lawsuits due to their innovative ways of information collection. Though the nature of their information collection methods were the same – which is extracting data from other websites - shopbots generally received favorable rulings while metabots received the opposite. As a result, shopbots become a dominant B2C ecommerce category nowadays while metabots-enabled ecommerce only exists in certain niche markets. This paper intends to explore the validity of the legal measures related and demonstrates that the legal force has a major impact on the development of Web technologies and the business models they later supported.

Publication details
Download http://www.doaj.org/doaj?func=openurl&genre=article&issn=19018401&date=2008&volume=3&issue=2&spage=112
Publisher International Association of IT Lawyers
Repository DOAJ-Articles (Sweden)
Keywords Yue Liu, Yun Wan, shopbots, metabots, Sylvia Kierkegaard, B2C Commerce, web technologies, comparison shopping service, Ticketmaster v.Ticket Com, database creators, data base users, tresspassing in cyberspace