Posted by Jerry Stuckle on 11/30/22 11:53

Kenneth Downs wrote:
> Jerry Stuckle wrote:
>
>
>>Additionally, do you have permission from EBay to use their information
>>in this way? All of it is copyrighted, and using it without their
>>permission can get you and the developer in a lot of trouble. Of
>>course, if this is for valid research, I would think they would be quite
>>willing to grant that permission. And any responsible developer would
>>want to ensure this is in place before starting.
>>
>
>
>
> Hmmm, I would wonder about the distinction between their HTML pages and the
> data points.
>
> Copying an entire page and displaying it as part of your business would
> definitely be a violation. Oh, except for google does that, um, they do it
> actually with the entire internet. There have been a few high-profile
> cases of people objecting, but by-and-large it seems to go forward.
>
> Ras is talking about gathering data points that they have made public. I
> would bet (of course IANAL) that he is ok until he starts thinking about
> going public. Then he will have to acknowledge the source of the data and
> obtain some kind of understanding.
>
>

But EBay is also a data collection - and that collection is copyrighted,
also. You can't make use of the collection without their approval, even
if you do just excerpt data and use the data in another way.

The Weather Channel is another data collection. The current temperature
is public data - available for free from the National Weather Service.
You cannot, for instance, collect hourly temperature readings a city or
cities from TWC's site, because the site is copyrighted. The fact it is
public and freely available from the NWS website doesn't matter - the
collection on TWC's site is copyrighted.

This has been upheld many times in courts around the country.

IANAL - but I got a good education on it when I sued a company for
taking my courseware for their own use. Their legal department settled
quickly - they knew they would lose in court. But in the meantime my
attorney provided me with lots of good info.



--
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Jerry Stuckle
JDS Computer Training Corp.
jstucklex@attglobal.net
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