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Amazon has filed a lawsuit against Alexaholic (Statsaholic) for using Alexa API’s to display the traffic stats in more meaningful ways. Funny and strange as it might seem but this is exactly what has happened.

Alexaholic was launched by Ron Hornbaker in February 2006 out of frustration from using the clumsy and clunky Alexa graphs. Alexaholic was simple a better User Interface to Alexa with more efficient DHTML and allowing users to compare traffic graphs of multiple sites. Alexaholic was doing all this by using the API’s provided by Alexa itself, meaning all was totally legit. In short Alexaholic was what Alexa should have been or could have been. Alexaholic became so popular that for a while it was the number 1 search result on queries for “Alexa”. Geoffery Mack, the Product Manager at Alexa applauded Alexaholic by saying:

Our enhancements may not be as cool as Alexaholic, but they are a significant improvement.

Alexa continued to copy paste the UI enhancements made by Alexaholic for an entire year and then suddenly filed a URDP complaint with ICANN to get the domain taken away from Hornbaker , since it contained “alexa” in it. Even before ICANN could take any notice on this Hornbaker swiftly complied by changing the name of the service to Statsaholic.

But the story did not ended here, on the same day when Amazon CEO and co-founder was busy luring developers to use Amazon’s Web services and providing shiny stats about their scalability, Amazon’s lawyers were busy filing law suit against Hornbaker to do just that, i.e use Amazon’s webs services to build an application. (read the show case notice at the end)

Some hilarious but interesting quotes from the filing are:

• 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.
• Through this lawsuit, Alexa seeks to force Mr. Hornbaker to stop infringing Alexa’s trademarks and to stop pirating Alexa proprietary data.
• This is a complaint for an injunction, damages, and other appropriate relief to stop Mr. Hornbaker from:
  a) using Alexa’s name and trademarks, without permission and in bad faith, to profit from the website linked to the Internet domain name ; and
  b) 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.
• Upon information and belief, Defendent’s registration and use of Infringing Domain Name is designed to capitalize on the goodwill associated with the Alexa trademarks.
• Defendants 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.

To set the record straight, Mr Hornbaker stopped using Alexaholic domain name long before this suit is filed. Furthermore using an API to access data is fair use not “stealing”, and if it is why has Amazon opened up its API’s in the first place and why Jeff Bezos continues to deliver marketing pitches in front of thousands of developers to steal Amazon’s data, i.e use its API’s. There was absolutely no good will attached with Alexa trademarks and people around the technology world thought of it to be broken and clumsy.

This is a terrible PR move by Amazon, they have decided to sue a developer to oblivion when they could have hired him easily to merge Alexaholic/Statsaholic into Alexa. This move has now pitched them against the developer community, the very people they are banking on to make their web services a success by developing interesting and exciting applications on top of them.

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