Legal talks are underway between online recruitment agencies CareerJunction and Jobfood.com, over alleged breach of copyright relating to recruitment advertisements.
The talks relate to claims that Jobfood.com "scraped" recruitment advertisements from the CareerJunction Web site in breach of copyright, posting them on its own site to boost job numbers.
Jobfood.com recently embarked on an extensive advertising campaign to improve public awareness of the site. It said in a recent release that it had over 2 200 jobs advertised, with more than double the number of new CVs and page views in the first week of March rocketing by 125%.
CareerJunction MD Kris Jarzebowski says: "We all know that Jobfood is currently spending an enormous amount on advertising. Without job content on their site, they would have many unhappy jobseekers."
CareerJunction`s lawyers demanded that all jobs copied from CareerJunction be removed and all r'esum'e responses to the ads be sent to CareerJunction. The move reportedly made CareerJunction the first South African company to take legal action related to the copying of content from its Web site. CareerJunction said that jobs placed on its site were being reproduced on Jobfood.com using the exact wording produced by CareerJunction`s own copywriters - even down to typographical errors.
Jarzebowski says: "We discovered that Jobfood.com had somehow copied hundreds of job listings from CareerJunction and placed the same job content into their own job database. We can only assume that a process was written or done manually to `scrape` the screen of data and place it somewhere into another database."
Jarzebowski adds that the advertisements were placed under the banner of Jobfood.com, with no reference of the advertiser or telephone number. The only way for job-seekers to respond to the "copied" ads is via a generic Jobfood e-mail address. This, he says, misrepresented the true size of Jobfood.com`s CV database to jobseekers.
Jobfood.com MD Ephan Bosman says 1 800 advertisements were removed from Jobfood.com`s listings in response to CareerJunction`s action. However, he says this was done as a gesture of goodwill to avoid public "mudslinging", and is not necessarily an admission of wrongdoing.
Bosman says he cannot comment further on the matter as a legal process is underway. However, he says: "Not a single position on the Jobfood.com site bears any relationship to a position carried on CareerJunction."
Bosman says he is optimistic that a satisfactory settlement will be reached in the matter.
Share
