How my school rejected an app made for students

Sorry to hear it. You're completely right, there's nothing unethical about what you did, and if you did get sued for it in "real world", any competent judge would laugh the plaintiff out of the room.

If you really want to fight for it, perhaps you can get support from the student body and the teachers that have liked the app before?

If not, well, at least you learned a lot by completing it, congratulations on that!

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.

"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 do with the school."

Biggest problem with education. It is not about learning how to learn, enterpreneurism or any other fun thing you could think of. Is about learning how to obey, and letting those in charge take care of things (even if they're done terribly by people who actually don't like/care for it).

edit to add something else: I think more schools should allow for software to be made by the students. They understand the needs of the other students better.

Educacional is their provider for some online content (mainly games and similar stuff for young kids to have IT lessons). The grades db, memos and so on are managed by the school itself, and the news as well. Educacional, as far as my app is concerned, is simply a gateway for getting authentication tokens to /those/ services which I actually use.

And, the app that I mentioned in the article (which could be considered as a competitor of sorts) is also being developed by the school itself.

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 they all sat you down (quite literally like going to the principal's office) was simply bullying.

Keep your chin up and look beyond this. This app is not the fight worth expending energy fighting for.