81–88 of 88 posts
To the OP, I feel for you. Your app made someone over at the IT dept feel inadequate. Remember, some older IT person is trying to protect their job, no matter how crappy they're doing it. Your app, as you had mentioned, was much better than the one that they made. This, unfortunately, is the way the world is. Think about patent trolls, incumbents suing start ups that threaten to shake up the industry, etc. The way th…
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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.
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Their app's feature set consists of contact information, maps to the school, a gallery of static photos about the school, and webviews that display their website's content directly. It doesn't even comprise grades, memos and so on, which is what my product's focus is. That's why I don't think that's the reason.
So, you requested written permission... didn't get it... charged for your app... and now they are just a bunch of luddite meanies turning you into an evil villain instead of fawning all over you? You are serving as a proxy for credentials into a system where the school is legally liable to protect the privacy of the students, families, and staff. Yeah. You get shut down NOW. It doesn't matter where your code is or ho…
"All those people" are responsible for a public API; in this case, it is a text-based api over HTTP only, meant for human consumption, but it's an API nonetheless. This app does not bypass that API. If they don't like how the API is being used, they need to change it; but of course you can't close it completely. This is the analog hole of the Internet.
Web browsers are just a client for that particular kind of API. It's ridiculous to limit which clients can access an API, as long as they do so correctly. Of course, you can make it difficult or impossible for unapproved clients to access the API, that will achieve the goal; that's what DRM does. But by not putting those controls on the API you're allowing new competing clients to connect with it.
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.
The schools position is analogous to claiming that someone is pirating your freely downloadable PDF document because they used Nitro instead of Adobe Reader to view it.
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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.
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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.
Did you read the story ? He tried to talk to the school but after several school employees told him they liked his app they changed their tune and decided he was ripping them off. T hey could have worked to understand what he had done and offered him his costs to open up the app but they decided not to.
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So, you requested written permission... didn't get it... charged for your app... and now they are just a bunch of luddite meanies turning you into an evil villain instead of fawning all over you? You are serving as a proxy for credentials into a system where the school is legally liable to protect the privacy of the students, families, and staff. Yeah. You get shut down NOW. It doesn't matter where your code is or ho…
But it sounds like the app isn't doing anything a web browser couldn't do. This is a recurring theme among authoritarians now: take something that a web browser does, and argue that because it's being done outside of a web browser, somehow that's wrong. Look at weev; that's exactly what he did (there are certainly other aspects, but it was one used to scare the court and the aspect that the prosecutor willfully faile…
It's not a public API meant for human consumption. It's a viewstate object, which is meant for currying data back and forth inside controls, etc. in an ASP.Net application. It's not an API. He had to hack that format which is feasibly a DMCA violation as well.
Weev would be a horrible example to bring up.
I'm not sure we're going to close a gap here if you feel all copyright is stripped the moment data can be presented in an anonymous user's browser.
"This goes to show that as much as schools attempt to mask the image of a great environment for students to thrive, learn enterpreneurism and so on (mine does that a lot), they’re traditionalists to the point that it doesn’t make any sense. What do they have to lose with my app? How is that classification as copyright infringement even pertinent? They apparently just must have control of anything that has anything to…