Hacker News Reader

There's no license because it's facts and can't be copyrighted.

For the US, correct [1]. For other countries, YMMV.

Edit:

e.g. in the UK, sui generis rights apply to a database [2], such that if creation of a database required

"substantial investment in obtaining, verifying or presenting the contents of the database"

then someone else cannot copy it and re-publish in another form. This is very different from US law, which requires some "creative originality" to be involved.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications,_Inc.,_v._R....

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sui_generis_database_right

Would this also apply to a database such as IMDB, since movie information is just facts? So, like, I can crawl their website and make a public-domain database of movies/actors? This would be cool, since I'm not aware of any free database for movies/actors.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com