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Comment by twerquie | Hacker News Reader

You're probably about to discover that the data is also not free.

The facts are not copyrightable. http://www.lib.umich.edu/copyright/facts-and-data

But there's probably a violation of the terms of use, so maybe it's not a good idea to say to everybody that you take the data on the official website.

The sochi2014.ru terms of use does not prohibit the use of robots/crawlers/scrapers.

http://www.sochi2014.com/en/terms-of-use

But, they prohibit the copy of the content from the website, no matter the way you did it. Point 5.2:

"Except as expressly stated on the Website, you are not entitled to copy, publish, download, modify and redistribute the information provided on the Website without the prior written consent of the Sochi 2014 Organizing Committee."

IANAL, but that sounds either like you can't do all of those things together (the "and" conjunction), or you can't even read the website. After all, if you can't download it, you can't view it.

Yeah, it seems the facts are the most important part. I mean the data should be openly available, right? and that lowering the barrier to use by programmers and data scientists should improve the quality of how people interact with and experience the olympics. We're hoping it will help devs build super interesting visualizations and/or apps (that otherwise weren't possible).

Is the fact that facts aren't copyrightable the basis for how you're planning to allow APIs to be created from most sites?

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