Legal yes. It may be against their terms of service or some lame restriction because your showing them to be less competent.
In the Bay Area we have a variety of 'CalTrain' apps which vary in quality and utility, they all rely on the same data. None (in my opinon) capture the elegant simplicity of the original PalmOS application.
In terms of infrastructure improvement, a generalized mash-up of all public transit combined with location based sensing and destination intent would seem to be the end goal. Maybe with an overflow timeout that links to Uber :-)
The reason why i'm asking for it legality is because i'm planning to launch a marketing campaign to attract more users (actually have 2769k on iPhone/Android without any marketing): i'm trying to provoke them with the campaign to make them buy the app and rebrand it.
Thanks for the feedback.
In this case, they could cut him off from accessing their data. Out of date train schedules would mean his app wouldn't be worthwhile. But suppose the data was not time sensitive -- imagine if the train schedules never changed.
What then? Once he has the data, what can they do? In the U.S., the Feist v. Rural decision stated that you cannot copyright facts[1]. So it's not covered under copyright, and technically he wouldn't be "using" their website anymore.
What happens then, if the author decided to continue using the data that he gathered against their ToS? Would a civil suit be a (realistic) option for the source company?
I'll go to an athorney maybe but i would like to have some rough ideas on how it work elsewhere before.
http://www.amtrak.com/servlet/ContentServer?c=AM_Content_C&#...
PS have you considered asking the people at Data.gov to help you out; They've got a reputation for being approachable and the executive mandate to back it up when talking to agencies and quasi-agencies.
There appears to have been some previous discussion on HN about this here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=411555
The unfortunate part of all of this is that the court system in general does not have its act together with regards to Internet Law. This is largely a function of Congress completely failing to pass any laws related to Internet/software property rights, especially in the area of patents. Which is why the entire patent system is a disaster now with regards to software IP. There are similar problems in the area of data scraping and intellectual property copying online. Basically for every case you can find where the court ruled one way, you can generally find a counter example where a different court ruled in a contradictory manner.