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How my school rejected an app made for students

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Re: How my school rejected an app made for students

#61
In the US, "Copyright does not protect facts, ideas, systems, or methods of operation, although it may protect the way these things are expressed[1]." This means that in the US you can take the phone book, digitize it, and as long as you present it in a distinct way you can publish that. It is clear that you wouldn't be in the wrong there.

In Brazil, copyright law is slightly different (emphasis mine):

"The current body of Brazilian copyright exceptions and limitations may be divided into three groups, relating to: 1) partial or full reproduction; 2) derivative works; and 3) performing rights. The three tables in the following sections provide an exhaustive list of the limitations present in Brazilian copyright legislation.[2] The dominant view in Brazilian literature is that exceptions and limitations lists are to be strictly construed, with no credence given to implied limitations. This is a primary tenet of Brazilian legal scholarship with respect to copyright; it is taken as dogma in academic writing and, as a result, often by courts as well[3]."

What I understand is that unless it is explicitly laid out as an exception, court houses would look at it as infringement.

"The reproduction of small excerpts of preexisting works of any nature, or of an entire work of visual art, is allowed within the context of a larger work. The reproduction itself must not be the main object of the larger work, and must not interfere with the normal exploitation of the work or cause unjustified harm to the legitimate interests of the author[3]."

Your app is doing quite a lot with the screen-scraped data. You're not just presenting it unadulterated, but you're transforming it to present it in a way easier to consume. Don't know if that constitutes enough for the scraped data to "not be the main object of the larger work".

"To integrate any given computer program into others, be it at application or operating system level, is permitted if done for personal use and unavoidable considering the user’s needs. Integration must be done for the exclusive use of the person who carries it out[3]."

You could argue that your application is doing nothing more than displaying available information to people that already have access to it in a way that answers the user's needs, but I don't think it would fly here because integration is not "done for the exclusive use of the person who carries it out".

"Higher-education institutions in Brazil usually do not provide clear policy guidance on course readers and textbook copying. In practice, the unlicensed reproduction of copyrighted material is essential to academic life. Course readers, copies of book chapters and even entire books can be found in files hosted by copy shops, ready for on-demand reproduction. Professors usually keep personal files as well, in which they include all of their courses’ required and complementary reading material. Students are frequently seen carrying spiral-bound photocopied textbooks to class. This is all done without prior authorization from rightsholders[3]."

I find it extremely ironical that an "industry" that thrives (IMO correctly) on copyright infringement, would go against a screen scraper for copyright infringement of facts.

[1]: http://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-protect.html

[2]: http://www.bloomsburyacademic.com/view/AcctoKnowledgeinBrazi...

[3]: http://www.bloomsburyacademic.com/view/AcctoKnowledgeinBrazi...

Re: How my school rejected an app made for students

#62
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know where you live, but here in the US, you violated no copyright laws (or any laws or ethical clauses for the matter) by simply providing access to pre-existing works, ie. the schools website data. If the school's website is publicly accessibly, as-in anyone can find it online, then it's public information and you can use it at your will so long as you state where the information came from (ie. not your ori…

He is charging for the app, of course he is violating copyright laws.

How exactly? I fail to see that.

Re: How my school rejected an app made for students

#63
post #59

I was rooting for the OP up to the point when he said he was charging for the app. I know there wasn't some huge profit to be made there unless it's really huge school, but still. If he wanted to do something good for the school and fellow students shouldn't the app be free?

Profit = Sales - Apple's cut - Apple Developer Account annual fee - iTunes App Store annual fee.

What makes you think he will be making a profit on a $0.99 app ?

Likely he was not making any profit at all. Are you suggesting he shouldn't try to claw back some of his costs ?

And now they reject his app; he takes it down and definitely won't claw back anything. Now he is down $200 + time and effort. Yeah, screw him for trying to make money off the backs of anyone.

Re: How my school rejected an app made for students

#64

OP, consider this episode a badge of honor. You're doing the right thing. Learning valuable technology and skills for a successful future - not just in tech but in whatever you want to do. Finding a problem and doggedly pursuing a solution is what you need to do in "real life." Chalk this episode up to life experience. You have won a moral victory but as you said, don't expect them to change their minds. Graduate and…

Don't you think you're contradicting yourself a bit you encourage him to be persistent in fixing problems and never giving up but on the other hand you tell him to give up and let the school have its way.

The hacker mentality doesn't just abruptly stop once we're not dealing with programming issues.

Being relentless and constantly pushing to get what you want is a way of life.

Re: How my school rejected an app made for students

#65
post #16
post #4

You are right, your school is wrong. They should be thinking, "We should be also serving this data in a parsible format such as JSON or XML so apps like this are easier to create and to avoid breaking things if we change our HTML" Also, facts such as grades or sports results cannot be copyright at all.

Even if it were subject to copyright, you violate no laws (in any country I know of) by simply re-posting the information and providing attribution to the original author/creators of the content. If true, any news aggregator and most websites would be getting sued every day for regurgitating information.

You’ve posted this further up as well, but it is simply not true. The whole point of copyright is that no-one can re-publish (‘copy’) a copyrighted work without permission. News sites pay for the right to republish Associated Press reports, for example, as ‘hueving’ points out.

Aggregators like Hacker News and Reddit don‘t copy content as a whole, they just provide links. Providing a preview of the content, as Facebook does, might be considered either fair use or citation—but in neither case they’re copying and republishing the entire content.

Attribution does not magically remove copyright.

Re: How my school rejected an app made for students

#66
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IANAL, but websites are allowed to control (via their terms of service) whether you can scrape them and use their data. There is a difference between accessing a website via chrome and via a native app that uses the website as a service.

There is an even bigger difference between accessing a website via Chrome and via a native app which costs 99c.

The app doesn't aggregate content, it displays it. This notion of authorized clients you seem to have doesn't exist. If they put their HTTP port out there, they don't get to say access by Chrome/IE/FF is ok, but curl or your custom app is not. If you then republish the data from your site, that's a wholly separate issue, but displaying it on a viewer directly after requesting it from their site is not aggregation.

Re: How my school rejected an app made for students

#67
post #59

I was rooting for the OP up to the point when he said he was charging for the app. I know there wasn't some huge profit to be made there unless it's really huge school, but still. If he wanted to do something good for the school and fellow students shouldn't the app be free?

Because it's wrong to be compensated for one's efforts, even a tiny little bit, even with the risk of being shutdown and in the hole for Apple's fees before seeing the first penny?

Re: How my school rejected an app made for students

#68

Ah, you charge for theapp. Then they are correct, you are profiting of their work. If somebody was making money of my work, I too would be pissed.

This is a ridiculously extreme view. The school publishes that information for the benefit of students and faculty, not for a profit. Like craigslist, they probably do not hold any primary copy rights on the content to start with.

If someone were making money off my work, I'd be impressed.

Re: How my school rejected an app made for students

#69
post #63
post #59

I was rooting for the OP up to the point when he said he was charging for the app. I know there wasn't some huge profit to be made there unless it's really huge school, but still. If he wanted to do something good for the school and fellow students shouldn't the app be free?

Profit = Sales - Apple's cut - Apple Developer Account annual fee - iTunes App Store annual fee. What makes you think he will be making a profit on a $0.99 app ? Likely he was not making any profit at all. Are you suggesting he shouldn't try to claw back some of his costs ? And now they reject his app; he takes it down and definitely won't claw back anything. Now he is down $200 + time and effort. Yeah, screw him for…

Either way, IMO, students shouldn't be the ones paying (yes, I know it's only 1$). Maybe he should have made an arrangement with the school so they cover the Apple fees or fund it through donations.

Re: How my school rejected an app made for students

#70
post #23

Isn't a key part of copyright lawsuits damages? Let's say, for example, that the school did sue him for copyright infringement. Then let's say they win the lawsuit. It is in fact copyright. Now what? I believe he'd have to take it down and then pay damages. What, exactly, would the financial damages to a public institution be? Hell, even if it was a private school what type of damages could you possibly argue for thi…

No copyright law (in any country that I'm aware of, even if the OP sold the app) has been violated. The OP may be subject to some school policy... but that's it. The administration is plain wrong and the OP should pursue his app if he can withstand the administrations push-back/threats. You can always link-to and/or provide access to existing work (copyrighted or not) so long as you provide proper attribution (state…

I'm not certain that linking and providing access is the same. Let's take a copyrighted work which we can relate to more easily than web pages - TV Shows on Hulu.

Now, you can always link to Hulu in your browser and direct your visitors to Hulu. Hulu as the (C) holder can then decide if you're geographically suitable to recieve this content.

How about building a proxy webpage that provides access to Hulu (let's call it EU-Hulu)? We'll build a complete Hulu clone that works in EU by tunneling video streams via VPN to our page and stream them from our web video players.

I don't think that adding attribuition (ie providing a "THIS CONTENT IS FROM HULU" and their logo) to the page would solve our legal problems. If anybody can confirm that this is in fact legal, I know what I'll be developing in the near future: EU-HULU, EU-Spotify, EU-...

Copyright law is very very very strict. If it's not explicitely stated it's forbidden. Even by taking code from a pastie repository, where it's clearly made public, you're braking the authors Copyright unless he specifies Licensing terms that allows you to copy paste it into your app. Source code for all closed source software could be made public and that doesn't mean you're allowed to use it in any way.

To go even further - Hulu, while it openly shares video content to US citizens is unavailable to the rest of the world. We all know that you can bypass the limitation by employing VPN, but you're breaking the Copyright law nontheless. It's their choice if they want to limit access to their copyrighted materials.

If OP built a Web browser clone, he would be in the clear. He instead took data from the webpage, mangled it into his own app and sold it for 0.99$. Now while I do not agree with the tactics employed by the school (they should embrace it instead), image we would be talking about Wikipedia and 6.99$ BestEncyclopedia app, developed by Apple, which downloads the data and presents it a very nice way (they'd call it Cylopedia-Flow with huge images and Helvetica all the way).

Right now you'd be very pissed at Apple.

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