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Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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