andywar

May not be illegal, but is against the T&Cs of the site, so could be a civil matter if the original site decided to argue it in court…

No, but it’s my understanding that you can copyright a collection of them if the act of doing so involved considerable work, as pointed out by warp and myself multiple times. So the original website that was scraped holds such a copyright. Please don’t express your opinion as a fact… Of course, IANAL and don’t play one on TV, so both sides could be argued in court. But the original poster doesn’t have any more rights in the data itself than the person who allegedly ripped him off. He has rights in his code, his database schema, etc., but not in the data itself.

Similar or not, a lot of very highly-paid lawyers would love to argue over this for weeks.

My general argument is this whole situation is not as clear-cut and black-and-white as the developer in question asserts, however ‘moral’ or justified his objection to second developer’s seemingly less defensible actions in copying his work.

There seems little ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ here, just very subtle shades of grey and legal interpretation of who owns which rights to various elements of data, code, design and structure.

And without those IP permissions in place, in the form of written approval by the bus company to use their data, he risks opening one almighty can of worms…

Two wrongs don’t make a right, but I agree you have done work that should be protectable. I commend you for approaching them, but you shouldn’t have given up. Without written agreement from bus company that you have permission it’s going to be very hard to go after him. Get that and you are golden.

They have original creator rights and recourse for the way you extracted data without those permissions in place. http://www.opsi.gov.uk/si/si1997/73032--c.htm#15

While you could argue he has ripped you off, without that written permission to use the data you can’t effectively argue your case.

I’d say your sin was less deliberate and more from a position of ignorance, but sadly in law that’s little defence.

(IANAL, usual caveats apply. Seek legal advice, blah, blah.)

Except his own act of compiling is by ‘scraping’ the original source, against their own copyrights and T&Cs. In the case of a bus company’s timetable their own data—the times they run to, routes, etc.—is not public domain unless they release it as such. Both developers are equally at fault unless one or both has written permission to use the data in this manner.

I guess one obvious question is do you have permission from the Dublin Bus company to use their data yourself? From their T&Cs (http://www.dublinbus.ie/en/Legal/) ‘No part of this website may be copied, performed in public, broadcast or adapted without the prior written consent of Córas Iompair Éireann. All rights on this material are reserved.‘ Your own ‘scraping’ of the data is itself legally questionable.