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IP lawyer here. Don't rely on the following as legal advice about your specific situation, but in U.S. law: 1. The odds are that contract law is at least as

by dctoedt 12y ago

IP lawyer here. Don't rely on the following as legal advice about your specific situation, but in U.S. law: 1. The odds are that contract law is at least as much of a problem as copyright law. Check the terms of service of the various sites that you access; they probably prohibit doing what you're doing. (It's another question whether any given site's terms of service would apply to your access of the site if you didn't click on something like "I agree" at some point [1].) 2. There's no copyright in facts or data per se, but there can be a copyright in "original" selection and arrangement of facts and/or data. [2] 3. Copying and/or distributing copies of someone else's original content -- such as news write-ups or images -- is very definitely a problem under copyright law. 4. A content provider doesn't need to include a copyright notice to be able to get copyright protection. 5. Some content providers have tried to claim IP-like rights under the "hot news" doctrine; it's unclear to what extent such claims are viable. [3] 6. Conceivably one or more of the sites you access could claim that you infringe their trademark rights if you included their trademarks in your dashboard or in your marketing. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browse_wrap http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browse_wrap [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_v._Rural http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_v._Rural [3] http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/people/tfisher/IP/2011_Barclays_Abridged.pdf http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/people/tfisher/IP/2011_Barclays...

zaroth 12y ago
Thanks very much for your comment. I agree that contract law is definitely involved. I think Terms of Service are an agreement between the end-user and the site/service, not the software developer and the site. Google isn't agreeing to the ToS of every site someone visits using Chrome. Similarly, and end-user can probably use 'curl' to violate many sites' ToS, but that's not curl's problem. I did find this article "Copyright Exhaustion and the Personal Use Dilemma" [1] somewhat informative, although it doesn't really address my particular use case, because the content the users of my software would be accessing is not purchased, but being provided for free under some Terms of Use. E.g. "To the extent a copy owner reproduces or adapts her copy in order to enable a personal use, exhaustion insulates her from liablity." But it seems like this is a very gray area of copyright law. Digging back into the specific example, Redfin Terms of Use state: You will not copy, redistribute, or retransmit any of the information provided except in connection with your consideration of the purchase or sale of an individual property. So providing software which enables end users to collect and organize specific listing information from Redfin (not a site crawler), for that user's own personal use, stored on that user's own machine... I think would actually fall within the Redfin ToS. Another way to think about it, it's analogous to extending the 'Bookmark' functionality of a web browser to better organize and monitor your bookmarks for changes. Does 'Bookmarking' a webpage become copyright infringement if the bookmarking software supports... Mashups / co-mingling the content of related bookmarks Identifying diffs since the last time you visited Background polling of the bookmark with a notification when it changes Integrated "Bookmarklet" functionality which changes *how the content is displayed* [1] - http://www.minnesotalawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/Perzanowski_Schultz_MLR.pdf http://www.minnesotalawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/11...
- dctoedt 12y ago
  > I think Terms of Service are an agreement between the end-user and the site/service, not the software developer and the site. Don't be too sure about that -- the software developer usually is an end-user to at least some extent, if for no other reason than to ascertain how to scrape the site, and might very well be bound by the ToS. (Check out the link I provided about browse-wrap agreements.) > Google isn't agreeing to the ToS of every site someone visits using Chrome. No, but you might be inducing someone else's infringement, which could make you just as liable. You really need to talk to a good copyright lawyer about this. (Not me -- unfortunately I'm committed to other projects.)

by dctoedt 12y ago

zaroth 12y ago

Thanks very much for your comment. I agree that contract law is definitely involved. I think Terms of Service are an agreement between the end-user and the site/service, not the software developer and the site. Google isn't agreeing to the ToS of every site someone visits using Chrome. Similarly, and end-user can probably use 'curl' to violate many sites' ToS, but that's not curl's problem. I did find this article "Copyright Exhaustion and the Personal Use Dilemma" [1] somewhat informative, although it doesn't really address my particular use case, because the content the users of my software would be accessing is not purchased, but being provided for free under some Terms of Use. E.g. "To the extent a copy owner reproduces or adapts her copy in order to enable a personal use, exhaustion insulates her from liablity." But it seems like this is a very gray area of copyright law. Digging back into the specific example, Redfin Terms of Use state: You will not copy, redistribute, or retransmit any of the information provided except in connection with your consideration of the purchase or sale of an individual property. So providing software which enables end users to collect and organize specific listing information from Redfin (not a site crawler), for that user's own personal use, stored on that user's own machine... I think would actually fall within the Redfin ToS. Another way to think about it, it's analogous to extending the 'Bookmark' functionality of a web browser to better organize and monitor your bookmarks for changes. Does 'Bookmarking' a webpage become copyright infringement if the bookmarking software supports... Mashups / co-mingling the content of related bookmarks Identifying diffs since the last time you visited Background polling of the bookmark with a notification when it changes Integrated "Bookmarklet" functionality which changes *how the content is displayed* [1] - http://www.minnesotalawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/Perzanowski_Schultz_MLR.pdf http://www.minnesotalawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/11...

dctoedt 12y ago
> I think Terms of Service are an agreement between the end-user and the site/service, not the software developer and the site. Don't be too sure about that -- the software developer usually is an end-user to at least some extent, if for no other reason than to ascertain how to scrape the site, and might very well be bound by the ToS. (Check out the link I provided about browse-wrap agreements.) > Google isn't agreeing to the ToS of every site someone visits using Chrome. No, but you might be inducing someone else's infringement, which could make you just as liable. You really need to talk to a good copyright lawyer about this. (Not me -- unfortunately I'm committed to other projects.)