I took a look at some of the Digg.com user responses to the ZD Net Alexa vs. Statsaholic lawsuit article and here is a taste of their passionate replies.

From user: Yorn
“When you’re done reading that, please click the following link and uninstall Alexa toolbar:
http://www.alexa.com/site/help/?index=37

I’m not going to reinstall it till they drop the lawsuit *AND* issue a formal apology. We provide them their data, without us they wouldn’t have a business, and yet they turn around and sue one of us.”

From user: Disneynut
“I’ve already cancelled my Amazon Prime membership and am ready to cancel my affiliate membership with Amazon if they don’t drop this crazy lawsuit. How can they have a workshop with independent developers while at the same time sue this guy for taking advantage of publicly accessible data… data that Amazon wants people to use to help me Amazon better.”

From user: thekohser
“The fact that Amazon would sue over being jealous that an outside developer found a better way to render their publicly-released data, means that I won’t be buying anything on Amazon for the rest of this year. I’ll reconsider in 2008.”

There are some heated discussions on the Digg posting which I recommend anyone read who has interest in all sides of this case. The other side makes some good points too but I personally think they are missing the boat; working with Alexaholic instead of suing them would have made far more sense from a fallout and financial standpoint:

From user: IanRReardon
“This guy is taking Alexa graphics and data and calling it his own. He is doing it outside the API and violating Alexa’s trademark. Did you see his graphic before he changed his name. It was the Alexa logo with “aholic” at the end. Thats like me starting Google2, using googles exact logo and putting a multi colored 2 at the end.

I use to work at a search engine company and I know it cost Alexa MILLIONS to harvest and display that traffic data. This guy is just leaching onto it. Its totally not right. Even though he might have better features and option, it doesn’t give him the right to capitalize off of Alexa’s 10+ years of harvesting web data.

The API is a gift from Alexa. Alexa is saying, hey developers we’re going to give you access to all this data, we just want you to use it this way. What the hell is wrong with that? Google makes you use its API to run programmatic queries. No one yells at google, its the same .”