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Alexa Attempts to Crush Statsaholic

Ross Dunn — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 19:59:10 +0000

Amazon’s bullying tactics make my blood pressure rise. Alexa (owned by Amazon) has chosen to file a lawsuit against Statsaholic.com for "stealing Alexa’s proprietary data by disregarding the rules for Alexa’s Web Services–through which Alexa makes certain proprietary data available in exchange for a fee–and instead simply taking the data and graphs he wants without permission." (source: PDF legal filings)

Statsaholic.com which was originally Alexaholic.com had been operating for over a year without issue and, in fact, Geoffrey Mack (Product Manager at Alexa) posted on the Alexa corporate blog that the latest enhancements to Alexa "may not be as cool as Alexaholic, but they are a significant improvement." Furthermore, Alan Graham of ZD Net noted "in the meantime, Alexa continued to make improvements to their site, many of which were seen to be directly copied from Alexaholic."

Well now that the improvements are complete and even though Geoffrey Mack changed his domain from Alexaholic to Statsaholic to avoide trademark issues, it seems Alexa has had enough of him and have filed a lawsuit to crush this enterprising web 2.0 developer. Alexa claims Statsaholic’s "conduct has caused and will continue to cause damage to Alexa and an illicit gain of profit to Defendant, and is causing irreparable harm to Alexa for which there is no adequate remedy under the law."

Unbelievable! I salute Alan Graham for his well worded response to this backhanded move by Alexa:

"Excuse me? Little Ron Hornbaker…is causing giant Alexa irreparable harm? And the question that really begs to be asked is that why all of a sudden, over a year later, when Alexa had ample opportunity to address this issue, did they decide to do it now? The simple fact of the matter is that Ron Hornbaker built a better Alexa and as soon as it started to gain traction, and Alexa had already borrowed all the ideas it wanted from Alexaholic, they no longer needed it. Essentially, what Alexa wants from the lawsuit is to take ownership of the Alexaholic domain, stop Ron Hornbaker from accessing their site without written permission, damages which will go well into the hundreds of thousands, pay their legal fees, and crawl into a hole somewhere and never show his head again. … Is this how we work together in this shiny new world of Web 2.0?"

Apparently Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon and owner of Alexa was a bit flabbergasted when the Alexaholic dispute was raised by Tim O’Reilly during an interview in front of a crowd of Web 2.0 companies (the interview will be here soon). In response to Tim’s request that Alexa and Alexaholic find a way to get along (because they are both great websites) Jeff seemed to uncertainly stumble through a list of arguments about trademark rights and intellectual property.

All-in-all, I find it beyond sad that Alexa would target a great site like Statsaholic.com for infringement when it plainly compliments their own website. In fact, as was noted in other articles on this topic, Alexa’s data (its lifeblood) is compiled entirely thanks to the kindness of volunteers who install their toolbar. So where does Alexa get off torturing a small website that has done nothing but provide improved (and very popular) access to this data? I am sure they could have worked with Statsaholic.com to create an amicable solution. I hope the Alexa staff involved in this suit have some sleepless nights as a result of the inevitable public backlash of their foolhardy bullying.

Related Articles and Sources on the Amazon (Alexa) vs. Alexaholic Story

Om Malik calls this case a part of the "End of Innocence" of Web 2.0 as companies like Google and Amazon begin to reaffirm control over their information after letting Web 2.0 API users innovate for them.

"Amazon’s War on Statsaholic" by Michael Arrington at Tech Crunch

Alan Graham’s excellent coverage "Amazon sues Alexaholic… everyone loses!"

Comments

Like Statsaholic? Boycott Alexa

WebProNews Staff — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 16:31:51 +0000

Alexa’s lawsuit against Ron Hornbaker to shut down his Statsaholic (formerly Alexaholic) has spurred calls for retaliation against Alexa by boycotting its services.

This is another irony: Alexa is claiming that the data is proprietary, despite the fact that it relies on the community to supply that data. -- Pete Cashmore highlights Alexa's apparent thought process disconnect, as the data it supplies is the data it receives from others.

Those others tend to be in the SEO community, given the Alexa toolbar’s popularity with web marketers and similar people. Many of them have probably encountered Statsaholic (which was down at press time) and appreciated the features Hornbaker built to enhance what Alexa has been delivering to websites.

All good things do come to an end, and Alexa took the step of slapping Hornbaker with a lawsuit claiming trademark infringement and theft of proprietary data, ie the graphs Alexa displays. Hornbaker had previously changed the name of his site to Statsaholic, and has offered to pay for the graphs in question as he already pays for the data.

Geoffrey Mack at Alexa had accused Hornbaker of stealing the graphs rather than paying for API access to them. Mack also wrote that Hornbaker is trading on the Alexa name by redirecting traffic from Alexaholic to Statsaholic; we noted this redirect is still taking place.

The lawsuit has triggered some negative feedback for Alexa, especially since they have publicly complimented Hornbaker’s work previously. Cashmore picked up on the boycott Alexa theme from TechFold, which suggested it:

HOW ABOUT MONDAY, APRIL 23rd FOR AN API ECS BOYCOTT? Post your thoughts in the comments. By “boycott” I mean if you use ECS to link to Amazon for affiliate sales, shut ‘er down and hit amazon in the wallet.

Cashmore would like to see Amazon come around and drop the suit, as its approach could be seen as a negative by developers:

The irony is that Amazon is currently promoting the openness of its web service APIs. At the Web 2.0 Expo, Amazon chief Jeff Bezos promoted Amazon

Will Blogosphere Force Amazon to Withdraw Lawsuit?

Andy Beal — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 15:02:23 +0000

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has been caught saying one thing and doing another. According to ZDNet, while Bezos was chatting at the Web 2.0 conference and promoting his company’s S3 hosting service to the crowd, he was quietly suing the pants off of Alexaholic.

Quietly that is, until host Tim O’Reilly put Bezos on the spot.

O’Reilly asked Bezos point blank about the whole Alexa versus Alexaholic…Bezos seemed to be caught completely off guard by this question and tried to explain Alexa’s stand with that age old “intellectual property” and “trademark” line. It was clear that all O’Reilly wanted to see was a shift in Alexa’s policies, to be more open with the Web 2.0 community, and to hopefully foster an amicable solution for a service that he really liked and respected. That being Statsaholic.

As Alan Graham points out, anyone can download Alexa graphs and display them on their site and much of their information is collected by volunteers anyway. Furthermore, Alexholic had changed its name to Statsaholic BEFORE the Amazon filed its lawsuit to force them to “stop infringing Alexa’s trademarks and to stop pirating Alexa proprietary data.”

I’m certainly with Pete Cashmore on this one. Why would anyone want to use Amazon’s S3 hosting services when the company bullys a start-up that is merely providing a mash-up of Alexa?

I’m betting this will be at the top of TechMeme within hours and Amazon could face a reputation crisis shortly thereafter. Reaching out to help developers with one hand, while you smack them in the head with the other, is the kind of thing that will cause a backlash in a hurry.

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Web 2.0 Expo: Amazon’s Jeff Bezos Keynote

David Berkowitz — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 14:56:51 +0000

Bezos takes the stage. Intro remarks: all about Amazon Web Services, which is exhibiting here. The roster includes SQS, Mechanical Turk, S3, EC2.

I still like Amazon for books. Is that so wrong? His gist: you can use web services to scale backend operations like hosting at a fraction of the cost of building it yourself. And ultimately, what Bezos is reminding us is that Amazon’s a software company, not an online retailer. But do you want to be #1 in online retail, or another web services company competing with Sun, Microsoft, IBM, HP, etc? Yet Bezos aims to make the case that his take on web services isn’t just like any other company. Time will tell.

Interesting question from Tim O’Reilly: what’s up with the controversy over Alexaholic, especially now that it’s Statsaholic?

Bezos: Alexaholic’s domain still is there, but it redirects to the new site.

Tim: You should all get along. Bezos: There’s no open API for Alexa graphs.

Tim: That was true for Google Maps at first. Come on, kiss and make up. Play nice, kids. Everyone loves Statsholic.

Bezos: This is a business decision. We’ve got trademarks to protect. Talk to the hand, and talk to the lawyer. So there.

[Note: those were not exact quotes]

Comments

Amazon Puts Statsaholic On The Wagon

WebProNews Staff — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 23:59:55 +0000

The site formerly known as Alexaholic has proceeded from being lauded by Alexa’s owner, Amazon.com, to being the object of Amazon’s unpleasant, lawyerly advances.

The data offered by the Alexa website has been a fixture in search marketing for years. That focus and the IE toolbar requirement for Alexa may skew data for sites, but Alexa’s longer existence and available information has made it very popular, particularly with a hardcore stats-oriented audience.

Ron Hornbaker, creator of Statsaholic, fits in with that group. His side project isn’t viewed by Alexa or Amazon as a welcome extension of Alexa’s information any longer, as TechCrunch noted today.

Hornbaker blogged about his saga, from the original construction of the site during a long February weekend last year, to his current battles with the site:

About two months after launch, I got a voicemail from Geoffrey Mack, Product Manager at Alexa, requesting that I call him back….The conversation was, on the whole, encouraging and flattering