Other engines that use ODP to gain a profit?

What does ODP or others know about this?
I have been receiving soliticing emails from a website
(I cant' recall the website now). But it is from some guy named "Paul Wilson??' I think)

Anyway, the email says
"Will you kindly 'renew' your link for the upcoming year" for your search engine listing which reads as follows...

(etc. etc.)

Then a category and listing is presented with a renew button to submit on and charge $5.

If you go to this company's website, they are using a directory that is clearly mirrored from the ODP listings and trying to charge people $5 to renew the listing on their website.

Is this legal? It seemed to me if this website was gaining access to ODP, that no doubt the listings would stay on his website regardless of whether anyone paid him $5 to renew or anything.

does anyone have any input about this. Are other websites doing this.

It was not a giant search directory like Alta vista, or Lycos or anything like that. Just a "mom pop shop".

any input? Just curious as to it all.

I obviously deleted the email.

thanks for input.

In general terms, without knowing about what the site does, it is legal.If he does follow the DMOZ license - says that he uses ODP data, provides backlinks and so on.

That license does not exclude making money with the data. Anyway he should not state that the http://dmoz.org listing is renewed.

As windharp says, it's perfectly legal for someone to take the ODP data and alter it...as long as they comply with the license agreement while they're doing it (i.e. they have to provide the ODP attribution even if they add/delete/modify the source listings themselves). If you're talking about who I think you are (and I'm pretty sure you are), they are well known (and I don't mean that in a nice way). They're not complying with the full letter of the license agreement but that is a known issue.

My personal advice would be to ignore them (though since they were originally asking for $200 a month to "renew" listings, $5 is a relative bargain <img src="/images/icons/wink.gif" alt="" />) since they aren't worth any amount of money you'd pay them.

See also http://www.resource-zone.com/showflat.php?Cat=&amp;Board=abuse&amp;Number=13666 and http://www.resource-zone.com/showflat.php?Cat=&amp;Board=data&amp;Number=13179 .
Yes, looks like they're the same <img src="/images/icons/mad.gif" alt="" />

Ahh.. this is Topsites.us. It's been discussed before, but my two cents worth is that if they want to charge then that's up to them, but the whole thing is misrepresented as a "renewal" and backed up with a load of other claims that don't bear close scrutiny. Check out this article for some more information.

Also notice that topsites.us is grayed-PR. Why on earth should therefore anyone pay a dime for a listing in a grayed-PR, very low traffic (probably no more than a couple of dozen visitors a day, looking at the Alexa traffic ranking) list of sites grabbed from us and rebranded as their own piece of work?

You can have much more, for free, at the ODP. Ah, and we don't spam the whole world with "renewal notices", too.