Ask HN: Is this copyright infringement? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is this copyright infringement?

5 pointszaroth14 comments

Let's say I build a node-webkit browser based app which pulls content down from various public sites to display into a new dashboard.

Maybe it's financial data (stock quotes), maybe it's real estate, maybe news, or RSS feeds, whatever.

There are public APIs, designed to be pulled by a browser, where anyone running the software would be sending requests to whatever services.

To me, my guess is it shouldn't be infringement because the user is operating the software to access public interfaces. The user should be able to decide how to view content which you make available to the user.

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To me, my guess is it shouldn't be infringement because the user is operating the software to access public interfaces.

You will find this distinction nowhere in the laws of the United States.

The user should be able to decide how to view content which you make available to the user.

The laws of the United States, broadly speaking, make copyright holders able to make decisions of how to exploit their copyrights. That is what puts the "right" in copyright. "I feel like this would be more convenient for me" does not establish a copyright exception. There's some gray areas here for e.g. format shifting, but the model you're outlining is simply wholesale copyright violation. You would be unwise to pursue it. If you do pursue it, you will eventually be told to stop. After you fail to stop, should one or more copyright holders attempt to use the legal process to enforce their copyrights, you will lose.

Let me give an example -- I wrote some code to scrape real estate listings, populate my own DB, and a front-end to rank properties and track changes. It polls the listings and lets me know when things change.

At this point it's just code I wrote for my own use. I can't see how that's copyright infringement, but even if it were, it's just me organizing data on my own machine. There's no distribution, there's no commercial element. I could achieve a similar result pinning printouts to a bulletin board.

Now, let's say tomorrow I open up a Github repo and post the code under an MIT license... Someone wants to download and run it, they can. The program doesn't serve any content to anyone else, there's no P2P going on here. There's no sharing, or inducement to share.

Merely populating your DB was infringement of their copyright. So is "just you organizing data on your own machine". Making copies, and making derivative works (transforming the work in some way), are both exclusive rights held by the author of a work. Distribution is another of those rights, and infringing any of the rights is illegal. You do not need to distribute anything, or induce distribution, to be infringing someone's copyright.

The Copyright Act isn't terribly long or complex, and there are many good summaries of it online if anything's confusing. You might want to read it. Ignorance of the law is not a defense should you be sued.

I think it's quite a bit more complicated and nuanced.

For example, derivative works and transformative works are totally different beasts, so using the words as synonyms, and then saying this stuff isn't complex, I think is itself a good counterpoint.

If you're interested, take a look at the article I linked on Personal Use and Copyright Exhaustion.

As the OP giving an example trying to clarify the question in an 'Ask HN'... I don't get the downvotes? If you are downvoting, please let me know why.

Couldn't care less about the karma, but seems weird to have an OPs' posts grayed out in Ask HN threads?

Per your example, see prior lawsuit between Padmapper and Craigslist. It's public data. I believe this was before Padmapper was monetized so might not have been a monetization model. This was before Craigslist has its current map view.

Didn't change the fact that they were sued on grounds of infringing on data that was public. Whether they were right to do so or not is up to the legal system to decide.

IP lawyer here. Don't rely on the following as legal advice about your specific situation, but in U.S. law:

1. The odds are that contract law is at least as much of a problem as copyright law. Check the terms of service of the various sites that you access; they probably prohibit doing what you're doing.

(It's another question whether any given site's terms of service would apply to your access of the site if you didn't click on something like "I agree" at some point [1].)

2. There's no copyright in facts or data per se, but there can be a copyright in "original" selection and arrangement of facts and/or data. [2]

3. Copying and/or distributing copies of someone else's original content -- such as news write-ups or images -- is very definitely a problem under copyright law.

4. A content provider doesn't need to include a copyright notice to be able to get copyright protection.

5. Some content providers have tried to claim IP-like rights under the "hot news" doctrine; it's unclear to what extent such claims are viable. [3]

6. Conceivably one or more of the sites you access could claim that you infringe their trademark rights if you included their trademarks in your dashboard or in your marketing.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browse_wrap

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

[3] http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/people/tfisher/IP/2011_Barclays...

Thanks very much for your comment.

I agree that contract law is definitely involved. I think Terms of Service are an agreement between the end-user and the site/service, not the software developer and the site. Google isn't agreeing to the ToS of every site someone visits using Chrome. Similarly, and end-user can probably use 'curl' to violate many sites' ToS, but that's not curl's problem.

I did find this article "Copyright Exhaustion and the Personal Use Dilemma" [1] somewhat informative, although it doesn't really address my particular use case, because the content the users of my software would be accessing is not purchased, but being provided for free under some Terms of Use.

E.g. "To the extent a copy owner reproduces or adapts her copy in order to enable a personal use, exhaustion insulates her from liablity." But it seems like this is a very gray area of copyright law.

Digging back into the specific example, Redfin Terms of Use state:

   You will not copy, redistribute, or retransmit any of the information provided
   except in connection with your consideration of the purchase or sale of an
   individual property.

So providing software which enables end users to collect and organize specific listing information from Redfin (not a site crawler), for that user's own personal use, stored on that user's own machine... I think would actually fall within the Redfin ToS.

Another way to think about it, it's analogous to extending the 'Bookmark' functionality of a web browser to better organize and monitor your bookmarks for changes. Does 'Bookmarking' a webpage become copyright infringement if the bookmarking software supports...

  Mashups / co-mingling the content of related bookmarks
  Identifying diffs since the last time you visited
  Background polling of the bookmark with a notification when it changes
  Integrated "Bookmarklet" functionality which changes *how the content is displayed*

[1] - http://www.minnesotalawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/11...

> I think Terms of Service are an agreement between the end-user and the site/service, not the software developer and the site.

Don't be too sure about that -- the software developer usually is an end-user to at least some extent, if for no other reason than to ascertain how to scrape the site, and might very well be bound by the ToS. (Check out the link I provided about browse-wrap agreements.)

> Google isn't agreeing to the ToS of every site someone visits using Chrome.

No, but you might be inducing someone else's infringement, which could make you just as liable.

You really need to talk to a good copyright lawyer about this. (Not me -- unfortunately I'm committed to other projects.)

However, the alternate argument is, how much control should the publisher have over the full manor in which that content is displayed to the end user? I guess, this is what robots.txt is all about.

But where's the line to call something "robot"? A script run by a user, for their own use, I don't think it's bound by robots.txt. Does it matter who wrote the script?

robots.txt is nothing more than a way of politely asking the world not to recursively crawl through links on a site. It has no connection to whether someone is allowed to access the data or what they're allowed to do with it.

You can't void copyright - the owner of the data still owns it, no matter how they release it. Even for a work that you put in the public domain, you still own the copyright to it - you're simply giving everybody an unrestricted license to use it. By putting data on a publicly available website (or webservice) you are not giving up any copyright protections.

It sounds like in this case the copyright belongs to the owner of the API you are querying. They are licensing their data to the consumers of their API, under the terms of service on that API. if you violate their TOS, you're violating their copyright.

Check the terms of use of each of the APIs.

Well, why don't you infringe the copyrights and then tell us how it goes?

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