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Comment by josscrowcroft | Hacker News Reader

Good catch, thanks for that - though this only concerns the open source exchange rates API, not money.js - which can use any fx rate data you give it (including paid services, not that I plan to offer one.)

edit: That said - and even though we're semi off-topic - I contest that the google calculator API has no restrictions with being accessed by scripts or crawlers.

Note that their T&Cs under section 5.3 specify compliance with any 'robots.txt' file on the domains. In http://www.google.com/robots.txt, there is no mention of the /ig/calculator subdomain being prohibited to robots.

Also, under 5.5, the service isn't actually being duplicated, copied or resold.

Any thoughts on that?

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The website says "The ‘API’ is powered by a simple nodeJS scraper" so I got the impression that you were screen scraping the search page. Consuming an API is typically not considered scraping.

It's not obvious (and IANAL) whether an undocumented API is "provided", but the bigger stink IMO is your re-licensing of the data. The data is unquestionably copyright Google, license unknown. I'd get rid of the license-tag: You're giving the world a license to re-distribute some data that may very well not be yours to distribute in the first place.

Finally, providing data for download in a neatly packaged format would qualify as duplicating and copying in my reading.

FWIW, http://www.google.co.uk/intl/en/help/currency_disclaimer.htm... must be assumed to cover access through the API as well.

> Foreign currency rates provided by Citibank N.A. are displayed under licence.

That's fair. I pointed out somewhere in the docs that I'm open to people contributing improvements to the legals, including the license and disclaimer. For me, the important thing is that the data is available, for free and on-demand. I don't much care what license it's under, but I know that many people do.

Data cannot be copyrighted. Only creative works (defined loosely enough to include Michael Bay films) are covered by copyright law.

Yes, I was talking about https://raw.github.com/currencybot/open-exchange-rates/maste... + &callback=something

Great news :) Thanks

And, technically, aren't you accessing the Services through the interface provided by Google when you access their public API?

Yes! Having said that, I'm not taking any chances - I don't expect to hear from them, but will attempt to get an answer from Google as to whether this is ok.

I'm rewriting the scraper right now to use a different service with a more friendly TOS pending further investigation - can't afford a legal battle over this!

You might find this article, "Considerations on Exchange Rate Data Providers", useful: http://www.currencysystem.com/kb/13-143

It's from the website of the Cloanto system and has some ideas on publicly available FX feeds.

Cool project! Any plans for JSONP support?

I assume you're talking about the open source exchange rates API - will soon have JSONP support via the openexchangerates.org proxy, for sure - so like normal, you'll be able to go `callback=lolwut` or whatever you need.

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