Modista Closed Down
posted by: brianka in General on January 8th, 2010
If you have been to www.modista.com (one of my personal favorite) visual shoe-search engine in the last week or so, you will no longer find the fabulous resource for shoe-lovers that used to exist at that address.
Instead, you will be greeted with this:
This saddens me. I certainly understood that as a visual-marketing site, their time was likely funded by affiliate compensation programs. That doesn’t bother me. After all, helping them to potentially operate in the black with click-through revenue seemed like more than a fair exchange for the use of a truly superior shoe-hunting tool.
But, look closely at this portion of their statement, “We certainly don’t think the site violated anyone’s intellectual property. Anyway, it was fun to build Modista and we hope you enjoyed using it.”
This is telling. It appears to an outsider like myself that one of the designers or retailers whose stock photos were featured by the Modista search engine served Modista or their internet host with a DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) Infringement notice.
The DMCA is meant to protect online copyright of content and images. For example, Shoeblog has had their content ‘Scraped’ from time to time (ie. stolen in breach of the copyright that exists at the moment of publication) and used without attribution by those looking to use it for their own ad-revenue. So, I understand the urge to protect one’s digital work.
However, penalizing a search engine for stock sales images for some sort of intellectual property breach may not be best or appropriate use of the DMCA.
So, I can’t help but be curious, and a bit worried for any other search engines that use a visual component.
Anyway, I have an email pending to the folks at Modista. I for one, would love to know if my speculations are correct or if there are other details that would clarify this situation. I would certainly hate to be correct; it would mean that so many other great sites such as Polyvore could be next.
14 Comments
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January 27, 2010 at 7:24 pm, suchashame said:
I hope the claim above of like.com suing further visual search engines is false. I need to read through their patent further, which can be found at http://www.google.com/patents/about?id=-y7HAAAAEB…
Upon quick inspection, it seems analogous of getting the rights to 'selling something on the internet' or 'a hyperlink that takes the user to another page' – in other words, overly broad patents that should be thrown out as it stifles further exploration and innovation in the field. In this particular case, it is ridiculous to see the likes of like.com squish others on the basis of visual search patent infringement. An attempt to use their system only leads to great frustration.. why do I need to click 'visual search' on every item there.. not to mention a large 'buy' button is played higher than 'visual search', revealing true priorities – and should I accidently click on the actual item, which in most systems would then use that item for the next query – instead a popup is created trying to earn that click-through bounty with any chance possible.
I wait with anticipation to see how the visual search community reacts to this sort of bullying and can only hope like.com backs down and considers bringing their own system up to par before squishing a better product. /rant
January 24, 2010 at 12:21 pm, galligator said:
BTW, the folks at what used to me Modista have a little bit of clarification for us:
"… From your email and the comments on your blog, it seems there might be some additional confusion that we need to clarify:
We are not in any way associated with "rachel", who posted the comments on your blog. She seems to be independently developing her own visual search project; it will not be a new version of Modista.
*Important clarification given comments developing on this article.
January 23, 2010 at 8:30 am, galligator said:
Thanks to Modista for their email response. Due to litigation, they are not really commenting in any (public) detail on events at this time. However, if you're interested in following the case proceedings, you can access the public court records at https://ecf.cand.uscourts.gov/cgi-bin/iqquerymenu… after registering for a login at http://pacer.psc.uscourts.gov.
January 21, 2010 at 9:48 pm, rachel said:
fantastic! I will definitely send you an invitation once it is done.
January 21, 2010 at 4:31 am, galligator said:
Of course I would love to try it out. There really was no other tool out there as good at helping to find that elusive shoe you had seen on tv or in a magazine if you didn't know the name or brand already. Your search & keyword parameters were really comprehensive.
My shoeblog account is galligator@shoeblog.com
January 20, 2010 at 10:54 am, rachel said:
Thanks galligator. We filed a patent on our visual search technique already. We also talked to a lawyer (probably one of the best lawyer in town) about this issue after modista closed.
Btw, we will complete our new version of visual search engine in 2-3 months. Would you mind if I invite you to try it out when it is ready and before we launch it publicly? It would be great to have fashion lovers like you to try the new system first.
January 20, 2010 at 12:11 am, rachel said:
like.com is suing other visual websites too. I am working on beta version of a new fashion visual search engine (with shoes in of course). Product can be searched by color, shape, price history, etc. The first version of the website is running but I want to integrate more features in the website. I would like to share it when it is ready.
January 19, 2010 at 6:11 pm, galligator said:
Good luck putting in your own patent protection!
January 19, 2010 at 6:11 pm, galligator said:
This sounds like blatant abuse of the patent system. I'm dismayed at people able to patent an idea or version of a product who are going after people for separate designs that are not actually infringing. So many problems with our patent law right now…sigh.
January 09, 2010 at 6:14 am, mizztissa said:
aw, they'll be missed!
January 08, 2010 at 10:53 am, Prince Matchabelli said:
They're being sued by Like.com which is ironic because they just turned off their visual search feature.
January 08, 2010 at 6:04 am, galligator said:
Depending on the details, they may have settled just because it was too expensive to fight. I'd hate to see Like.com suing more of the visual engines – particularly since Like is a poor engine for shoe searches. Being the 1st to do something electronically does not automatically give one sole rights if the results are reached by another process or software coding.
Anyway, this is a lot of legalese to get through & I have background parsing through legal docs.
January 08, 2010 at 6:00 am, galligator said:
Reading your link now, thanks.
January 08, 2010 at 4:14 am, Shoehunting said:
It is very sad, indeed. There is a little more here (http://www.google.com/search?q=%22v.+ugmode%22) about why they shut down… Visual search is amazing, I hope we'll more of them someday online.