[Legality] Is a browser search engine about stream link legal?

[Alaanor]

Hi,

I’ve just created a browser search engine about streaming website. (Not yet published, just a little more code, and it’s ready) (Understand like google or duckduckgo, but not about general web, but specified content: anime streaming).

I would like to just know if creating this will be legal.

And if yes, say me if respect robot.txt is mandatory… ?

Please take note, with my website I didn’t will host any video, and didn’t give direct stream link (but the link of website page who contain the “iframe” of the video.)

Should I specified any mention of anything ? (Like accepting something when using this website, etc. ?)

Thank you for reading, and help. And yeah, this isn’t really the best forum for talking about that, I know If someone know a better forum about this subject, say me.

[TechnoBear]

@Alaanor

If someone know a better forum about this subject, say me.

I’ve moved your post into the Business section.

[quote=“Alaanor, post:1, topic:208183”]
And if yes, say me if respect robot.txt is mandatory… ?
[/quote]Mandatory, no - but it might get your bots classed as “bad” bots if you don’t. Better to respect other folks’ wishes, I would have thought.

[force]

A search engine is generally a neutral entity, unless the goal is to purposely index sites with illegal/shady activities.

For any links containing illegal activity, be prepared to see some DMCA take-down requests and take action based on those requests (if they are legitimate).

However, if the links are benign or perfectly legal, you should have no trouble.

[Mittineague]

@force

be prepared to see some DMCA take-down requests

Wouldn’t that be if this was a scraper reusing content instead of a search engine gathering links to pages?

True, search engines do display excerpts and other other information in addition to the links, which might be considered “content” rather than “context”. But I don’t think most sites would mind that.

As long as content isn’t being scraped the only problem I can think of other than not following the robots.txt is if the search rate was too high.

[force]

@Mittineague

Wouldn’t that be if this was a scraper reusing content instead of a search engine gathering links to pages?

Both. Google gets slammed every day with takedown requests for links. The same goes for link aggregators.

When a content owner can’t get a random Chinese site reposting their content to take it down, they usually send DMCA take-down requests to all the search engines that link to it instead.