Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How my school rejected an app made for students

theiostream.tumblr.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 88 posts

Re: How my school rejected an app made for students

#71

Post by luka-birsa »

schrijver wrote: post #65
Alupis wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Facebo…

I agree.

If I'm not mistaken, Google got sued for providing short excerpts of news from various news outlets and decided to settle out of court.

Re: How my school rejected an app made for students

#72

Post by pbhjpbhj »

estebank wrote: post #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 b…

Assuming [1] to be a proper rendering of the current law then I see problems with the school's claim that this activity is infringing:

Article 7(2) states, quite clearly, that the information in compilations and databases is not protected. Article 47 says that paraphrases aren't infringing - but no need to rely on that as Art.7 is so very clear. FWIW Art.8 says that calendars and diaries are also excluded from copyright protection (but be careful, as I understand, it Brazilian law doesn't treat lists as examples but as strictly complete).

The school's claims seem to be unfounded. Perhaps the OP could ask them - in view of their education(!) - if the school can show how the app is infringing the school's copyright in view of the Articles saying that information is not protected.

But as other's have noted it may be that you need to simply accept their position in order to protect yourself from expulsion or other negative actions the school could take.

You _could_ seek a copyright attorney/lawyer who will act for you pro bono!? Especially if you wanted to take this to the newspapers.

One issue that is unclear to me is the authorisation process. Does the app somehow scrape the users data centrally or do the users use the app as the interface to access the data that is on the web pages.

It's possible that the website terms of use state that scraping is not allowed. But I don't know with certainty how that one would pan out in my own country nevermind in Brazil. Either way that wouldn't be "copyright infringement".

- - -

[1]: http://entertainmentlawbrazil.com.br/brazilian-copyright-act...

Re: How my school rejected an app made for students

#73

Post by pbhjpbhj »

megablast wrote: post #44

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.

>" [...] they are correct [...] " //

Is this your legal opinion or a moral judgement.

IMO, and in the opinion it seems of Brazilian copyright law (see my other comment), copying information should be excluded from the monopolistic protection given to artistic works.

Presenting information that has been given away freely (gratis) is alternative forms seems pretty harmless. Here especially as the compilation of the information has been paid for, in some way, by the pupils families (or communities if supported by taxes) and the re-use of the information is for those pupils. Yes, the OP is charging for the app, but then no-one need buy it if they find that the new presentation of the information is not worth the price asked.

Re: How my school rejected an app made for students

#74

Post by outworlder »

> "I found out they were developing an app for themselves"

This is the reason, no need to look into it further. They probably sunk a lot of money in what turned out to be a crappy app. Knowing how these things work in Brazil, I wouldn't be surprised if the company developing it had ties with the school's administration. If so, a crappy app wouldn't usually be a problem... until this guy's app appeared. Then, the development costs will have to be justified.

Notice how they didn't complain that the student was making money. They don't care about that. All they care about is not looking bad, while furthering their agenda.

Re: How my school rejected an app made for students

#75

Post by mh_yam »

This reminds me of when I asked for permission to make an iOS app for my school and was denied with similar arguments. I guess it sucks more when you've already put in so much effort and it gets shot down in one meeting.

I did learn that the school stored user/password information from Active Directory in a flat file for one of the legacy applications...that was scary.

Re: How my school rejected an app made for students

#76

Post by clarry »

luka-birsa wrote: post #70
Alupis wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

This is not at all comparable to the OP's app, which (if I've understood the post correctly) is a special purpose HTTP client. If its user can use that app to get the data he wants, then he can also use a normal browser. It's using the user's credentials. There is no middle man tapping into a restricted stream and republishing that to the world.

> 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.

Nope. There are many wikipedia clones already. There is nothing wrong with them. And there are many special purpose http clients to show specific sites in a user friendly way. Nothing wrong with them.

Re: How my school rejected an app made for students

#77

Post by pistle »

Alupis wrote: post #42
pistle wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can believe to any degree you like, but there would be no concern about "fair use" in the copyright law lexicon if it only took "proper attribution" to re-purpose others' content for commercial or non-commercial use. The content of the school's site is quite likely copyrighted and they can control the form and location of copies of their content/data. Try this... Play an artist's song, in its entirety, on a radio…

We may be arguing apples and oranges here. The OP did not subvert anyone's revenue model. Simply aggregating data is not violating any copyright laws nor protections. If so... most news sites would be in serious trouble. The OP was simply aggregating data into an easily accessible format for students. The original creator retains copyright, but they can't prevent someone from linking to nor providing access to public…

We may be arguing facts and opinions.

It has nothing to due with revenue. Note my non-commercial language above.

If you write something and present it anywhere that copyright is implied or described, you, as the content creator, maintain control of your work. If someone scrapes it and re-presents it, even with proper attribution and you have not provided an explicit license, you can still require the third party to remove, revoke, forfeit, and/or destroy the copy of your content.

Posting their book, in full, online would not relinquish the author's copyright. They have to pretty explicitly grant license for other uses. See Creative Commons licenses. Those are pretty loose and they only require attribution.

And what's with all this method of access stuff now? I thought it was JUST proper attribution. Now you need to provide a method of access too? You're making this worse.

Re: How my school rejected an app made for students

#78

Post by clarry »

stale wrote: 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?

Coding stuff takes time and effort. It's really cool if you can give stuff for free, but I do not see why he's in the wrong to charge for his work.

Re: How my school rejected an app made for students

#79

Post by sxtxixtxcxh »

tcheard wrote: post #58
sxtxixtxcxh wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

really? you honestly don't see how a school allowing their students to sell their technical partner's (not public[1]) content is relevant? [1]: pre-emptive reply: no, it's not public, half the article is talking about how he's circumventing their authentication system. this is NOTHING like a news aggregator.

> allowing their students to sell their technical partner's content He isn't selling their technical partner's content. He is selling the reader, the content is already freely available to whoever can use the app anyway via a browser and their login credentials. There is a big difference.

i don't think there is a big difference. without their content[1], his app is nothing; the web browser is still a web browser.

[1]: it's irrelevant whether the school or the partner owned it, he did it without permission (and i highly doubt the reader has the license to do whatever they wanted with that data either).

Post reply on HN