Legality of using data from your application

Cathalog

Hard to tell if this should go here or in Legal Discussions...

So, I'm a student, and I want to build an iOS app purely to build some experience and add to my CV.

One of my ideas basically takes a websites data in the following ways:

a) send RESTful GET requests to the site, take the JSON response and display that information in the app.
b) take the HTML source code of certain pages on that site, parse it and display the data on the app.

I really want to progress with my idea, but am afraid of the legal issues that may be associated with it.

All of the data I am extracting can be accessed by anyone, there's no hacking going on here.

If it makes any difference, I don't intend to make any money from the app - no download cost, no ads.

It would be great if someone could give me some info on this.

Draco

Is there an API you can use for the data? Are there any term & conditions on the site that say you can use their data?

Screen scrapping can be a bit of an issue- on the technical side if they change the site then your app breaks (unless you've a server sitting in-between your app and their site that you can easily change) and on the legal side some companies take a dim view of it (Golden Pages has sued in the past over an app that screen scraped their data).

When submitting to the Apple App store these days one of the questions if you're using 3rd party data and if you have permission.

If you're looking for some data sets to use, there's a list of open data set made available from the government here:
http://data.gov.ie/

Cathalog

Draco wrote: »

Is there an API you can use for the data? Are there any term & conditions on the site that say you can use their data?

Screen scrapping can be a bit of an issue- on the technical side if they change the site then your app breaks (unless you've a server sitting in-between your app and their site that you can easily change) and on the legal side some companies take a dim view of it (Golden Pages has sued in the past over an app that screen scraped their data).

When submitting to the Apple App store tese days one of the questions if you're using 3rd party data and if you have per

If you're looking for some data sets to use, there's a list of open data set made available from the government here:
http://data.gov.ie/

Thanks for the reply!

The website has no terms and conditions listed anywhere on their site. Just a copyright symbol at the bottom of the page.

Yes, I do realise that there is a risky assumption made that the website won't change its data, but it was a risk I was willing to take.

Any link to the Golden Pages case? Did they win?

I might just send an email to the site owner, and see if they allow me to use it (I have my doubts, though!).

Thanks for the data sets - will definitely have a look through them.

Evil Phil

I didn't know about the golden pages issue but I do know that Ryanair have successfully sued companies for screen scraping their site.

Manach

In EU copyright law, unless stated otherwise and barring some limited exceptions, the data owner retains ownership. So permission has to be obtained.
However, there is usually alot of Creative commons that that is out there and with the growth of the Open Data movement, there is lots of government data that is available for use.

Draco

Cathalog wrote: »

Any link to the Golden Pages case? Did they win?

I don't have a link but I do know they won as I was told the story by the developer of the offending app.

mneylon

Unless the data publisher has published a clear waiver of their rights - be that via a CC license or by giving access to data via an API (which might have terms associated with it) then you can assume that the data is not yours to use and abuse.