4 ms·

It is not a grey area, it is illegal and a copyright violation. What is it with all these supposed lawyers offering supposed advice to people that what they're

It is not a grey area, it is illegal and a copyright violation. What is it with all these supposed lawyers offering supposed advice to people that what they're doing isn't wrong?

burnout1540 18y ago
Statistics and straight up facts are not covered by copyright. There's a landmark case about this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications_v._Rural_Telephone_Service http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications_v._Rural_Tel... There are some grey areas around the legality of scraping (mostly due to the added load on the servers), but for the most part it is legal. Google is one big giant scraping machine and it's scraping a lot more than non-copyrightable statistics.
- timcederman 18y ago
  If they derived the statistics themselves, then that indicates enough level of unique effort to make the data copyrighted. I discussed that linked Wikipedia article in the other thread about copyright law... I don't think you can use that as a counterargument for statistics.
- sethg 18y ago
  If the company hosting these stats is charging $25K per licensee, then either they're really good at bluffing or their lawyers have made sure that their data is protected in spite of Feist. For example, if they use some kind of clickwrap "you must consent to this license before you can see our statistics" page, then the company doing the scraping could be sued for contract violation, even if there's no copyright issue. So the site owner can't hit you for statutory copyright damages and has to settle for actual damages, i.e., the $25K of license fees that you're not paying, plus attorney's fees, plus whatever else their attorney can think to lather on. And your would-be partner hasn't even set up a corporate veil to protect his personal assets from this kind of exposure? That's...insane. And not in a good way.

It is not a grey area, it is illegal and a copyright violation. What is it with all these supposed lawyers offering supposed advice to people that what they're doing isn't wrong?

burnout1540 18y ago

Statistics and straight up facts are not covered by copyright. There's a landmark case about this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications_v._Rural_Telephone_Service http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications_v._Rural_Tel... There are some grey areas around the legality of scraping (mostly due to the added load on the servers), but for the most part it is legal. Google is one big giant scraping machine and it's scraping a lot more than non-copyrightable statistics.

timcederman 18y ago
If they derived the statistics themselves, then that indicates enough level of unique effort to make the data copyrighted. I discussed that linked Wikipedia article in the other thread about copyright law... I don't think you can use that as a counterargument for statistics.
sethg 18y ago
If the company hosting these stats is charging $25K per licensee, then either they're really good at bluffing or their lawyers have made sure that their data is protected in spite of Feist. For example, if they use some kind of clickwrap "you must consent to this license before you can see our statistics" page, then the company doing the scraping could be sued for contract violation, even if there's no copyright issue. So the site owner can't hit you for statutory copyright damages and has to settle for actual damages, i.e., the $25K of license fees that you're not paying, plus attorney's fees, plus whatever else their attorney can think to lather on. And your would-be partner hasn't even set up a corporate veil to protect his personal assets from this kind of exposure? That's...insane. And not in a good way.