Alan Graham reports that Amazon, owner of the web-traffic stats company Alexa, is suing Ron Hornbaker, who created a service called Alexaholic (later renamed Statsaholic) that reuses Alexa data in useful ways

At first glance, it does seem that Alexa has a decent case to make when it comes to taking their IP and trademarked materials. However when you read the 43 page complaint, some interesting things pop out and make you wonder if this is really such a cut and dry case of infringement? One excerpt in particular that catches my eye is:

"Unfortunately, Mr. Hornbaker has refused to stop trading off the Alexa name. And he has deliberately circumvented every attempt by Alexa to block him from stealing its traffic graphs."

a few lines later we have:

"Through this lawsuit, Alexa seeks to force Mr. Hornbaker to stop infringing Alexa's trademarks and to stop pirating Alexa proprietary data."

There are two things I find interesting about these statements. First, thousands upon thousands of websites link to Alexa graphs, which is one reason their site is so popular in the first place. Looking over large sites like O'Reilly and Paul Kedrosky's (who called Alexaholic "marvy") Infectious Greed, I found several "stolen" traffic graphs. Will Alexa now target anyone who places Alexa data in their sites?

Alan says: "So far the response to my post is...the web 2.0 world is pissed..." Link