Hey - before answering the specific questions, I'd take a step back and say that the ultimate judge on web services like outbrain should be the user, not the court (assuming the service is legal, and I believe that both linking and framing are perfectly legal). I think outbrain offers great value to all 3 stakeholders - the reader, the blogger installing us, and the site receiving traffic - and so I hope these stakeholders keep us honest and let us know if we're doing anything that's distasteful in their mind. If you search for references about outbrain on the web you'll find that they are all very positive.
Specifically -
1) We do not request the content creator's permission, and don't think we need to. The content we link to is published publicly, and linking to it is perfectly legal. As I mentioned before, we'll gladly block links to any site that's not interested in them promptly after getting a take-down request.
(BTW - why would you expect services like outbrain to ask for upfront linking permission, but not from say Google?)
2) I think what you said is reasonable... we're in business for providing a great product and getting people to use it. I think that is fine.
As for the crawling - our crawler respects your robots.txt settings, so if you wish to prevent us from indexing your site you can easily do so.
4) Our business model will likely evolve around advertising, though the frame will probably not play a major role on that. As I said above - we hope our bloggers and readers keep us honest and let us know as soon as we breach their respect of our product. Our users' loyalty is paramount to us, and we would not breach that trust too easily...
5) Any solution other than framing would require us to pull the target page and insert our code into it. That is something we would not do because that really is distasteful - for example, it would affect the site's ability to properly serve and count their ads.
Bottom line - a frame is far from perfect - I agree with you about that - but I don't think it's inherently evil if used with some care.
Specifically - 1) We do not request the content creator's permission, and don't think we need to. The content we link to is published publicly, and linking to it is perfectly legal. As I mentioned before, we'll gladly block links to any site that's not interested in them promptly after getting a take-down request. (BTW - why would you expect services like outbrain to ask for upfront linking permission, but not from say Google?)
2) I think what you said is reasonable... we're in business for providing a great product and getting people to use it. I think that is fine. As for the crawling - our crawler respects your robots.txt settings, so if you wish to prevent us from indexing your site you can easily do so.
4) Our business model will likely evolve around advertising, though the frame will probably not play a major role on that. As I said above - we hope our bloggers and readers keep us honest and let us know as soon as we breach their respect of our product. Our users' loyalty is paramount to us, and we would not breach that trust too easily...
5) Any solution other than framing would require us to pull the target page and insert our code into it. That is something we would not do because that really is distasteful - for example, it would affect the site's ability to properly serve and count their ads.
Bottom line - a frame is far from perfect - I agree with you about that - but I don't think it's inherently evil if used with some care.