With Salesforce.com’s acquisition of Jigsaw, you can now easily export contacts from Salesforce.com to Jigsaw. (For more on crowd-sourced data sources like Jigsaw, click here.)
However, ad agencies, as well as any other Salesforce.com user, must now recognize the significant intellectual property issues presented by this merger. Most importantly:
- Whose contacts are in your current Salesforce.com account, or your internal database?
- Do you have the right to export these contacts to a third party? If so, under what circumstances?
- May that third party sell them?
This is important as your agency may be opening itself up to potential legal liability. Consider:
- If you export contacts, purchased from a third party, into Jigsaw, what is your potential liability for violating the third party’s license agreement?
- If you import contacts from Jigsaw that belong to a third party, what is your legal liability for doing so?
Here are extracts from the license agreements of popular providers of new business prospecting information to ad agencies:
The List:
You are specifically prohibited from: (a) using or permitting the use of Information to prepare an original database or a comparison of the Software to other databases that are sold, rented, published, or furnished in any manner by or to a third party; (b) using or permitting the use of Information for the purpose of compiling, enhancing, verifying, supplementing, adding to, or deleting from any mailing list, business directory, or other compilation of information that is sold, rented, published or furnished in any manner to a third party.
Access Confidential:
The Content on this Web site is for use by the Subscriber and its Users only and not for commercial exploitation. A User may not decompile, reverse engineer, disassemble, rent, lease, loan, sell, sublicense, or create derivative works from either this Web site or its Content. A User may not use any network monitoring or discovery software to determine the site architecture or extract information about usage, individual entities or users. A User may not use any robot, spider, other automatic software and/or devices or manual processes to monitor or copy this Web site or its Content without the Provider’s written consent. A User may not copy, modify, reproduce, republish, distribute, display, or transmit to third parties outside the User’s agency network for commercial, non-profit or public purposes any or all portions of this Web site without the Provider’s written consent. A User may not use or otherwise export, or re-export, this Web site or its Content pursuant to the export control laws and regulations of the United States of America. Any unauthorized use of this Web site or its Content is expressly prohibited.
Redbooks (Lexis Nexis):
The Content on the Site is provided solely for your personal use and not for commercial exploitation. You may not decompile, reverse engineer, disassemble, rent, lease, loan, sell, sublicense, or create derivative works from the Site or the Content. Nor may you use any network monitoring or discovery software to determine the site architecture, or extract information about usage, individual identities or users. You may not use any robot, spider, other automatic software or device, or manual process to monitor or copy our Site or the Content without our prior written permission. You may not copy, modify, reproduce, republish, distribute, display, or transmit for commercial, non-profit or public purposes all or any portion of the Site, except to the extent permitted above. You may not use or otherwise export or re-export the Site or any portion thereof, the Content or any software available on or through the Site in violation of the export control laws and regulations of the United States of America. Any unauthorized use of the Site or its Content is expressly prohibited.
Hoovers (D&B):
The Services are licensed for Customer’s internal use only and subject to any restrictions set forth in the Order. Customer will not provide Information, or other Services to others, whether directly in any media or indirectly through incorporation in a database, marketing list, report or otherwise, or use or permit the use of Information to generate any statistical or other information that is or will be provided to third parties (including as the basis for providing recommendations to others); use or permit the use of Information to prepare any comparison to other information databases that is or will be provided to third parties.
As you can see, if you’ve purchased information from one of these third parties, and have exported or plan to export it to Jigsaw, you are clearly violating their license agreement(s). For these third parties, the natural next step is legal proceedings. It remains to be seen if it’s against Salesforce.com, their clients, or both.
My recommendation is to go back and re-read the applicable license agreements – your legal obligations – if you’ve purchased data from a third party anytime in the last few years. And then, be very careful to document what you export to Jigsaw, if anything.
Better yet, just don’t do it.
