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Comment by Travis | Hacker News Reader

So what happens if they contact him and tell him to stop, and that he doesn't?

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 Out of date train schedules would mean his app wouldn't be worthwhile.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?

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_v._Rural

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This is still an emerging area of law. I'm not familiar with Feist v. Rural, but what you are discussing is very similar to Ticketmaster vs. Tickets.com, in the case of the latter scraping the former's site for data.

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.

This is actualy what i want to know. i'm asking it here because i've done some search localy and the legislation don't tell anything about this.

I'll go to an athorney maybe but i would like to have some rough ideas on how it work elsewhere before.

You should check with a lawyer, but when you say 'national railroad company' I think of Amtrak, which is a corporation that is 100% owned by the US government. According to their ToS they would be within their rights to cut off your access, but actually launching an infringement suit against you would probably be an expensive waste of their time. I think you would be OK as long as you complied with a cease-and-desist notice if they saw fit to issue one - but I'd say a bigger worry would be making sure you're covered against suits arising out of errors in the schedule you present to users. Again, I'm not a lawyer!

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.

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