Forum Moderators: not2easy
My main competitor for widgets has a large database of towns in the US - I would guess 20K towns.
I figure i could buy a database somewhere with similar towns set similar to my competitor if the price is right - or i could go to each state page and copy and paste his towns in to my database (about 400 per state).
If i copy his database and then add a few towns that he doesn't have and display the results in a similar fashion has he is, do i have any copyright issues to deal with?
Freq---
And if it is good, he's probably got it seeded with entries like:
Stolendata, Kansas
Rippedoff, Florida
...so all he has to do to find thieves is search for those terms.
No kidding.
Now, how do you know I'm not your competitor's lawyer?
Don't get lazy. Get working.
If I were a court I would want definitive proof that the entry came from your site and not another site.
also would you file a lawsuit against google or some other search engine that "stole" your database entry?
What i have decided to do it use a combination of databases from different sites. And then check for each one for bogus items.
I think i will also add a bogus item in mine to just to see if anyone copies my hybrid DB. :)
Don't think your copying will be limited to copyright issues. Read the TOS for the sites you life material from. "Borrow" their data and you may be sued for $ damages per day for unauthorized use as spelled out in the TOS.
Of course, you could always ask the various sources if they would 1) share; or 2) license your use of their data. What's so hard or so wrong about that?
That said, I've never defended a thief who was more convinced he was going to get caught than he was convinced he wouldn't get caught. Same story every time.
I hate to see someone take a fall, which I why I speak up, speak bluntly, and lay out just how things can become messy. Here, despite my gnarly, tough talking, bully outward appearance, I'm your friend. My mission is to kick you square in the noggin, in hopes that I can jar your thinking. However, despite my best efforts I usually find that those bent on some version of misbehavior just keep on going down their chosen path, usually until they either go to jail, are bankrupted, or get whacked in some fashion (usually financial) by their own ilk.
Out in the world at large there's plenty of lawyers, not nearly as nice as me, looking for work and you're making work for them. If you choose this path - not asking, not licensing, not paying - then consider yourself a piece of work.
Matt
And, if you do copy his work, his lawyer may emulate me: No warning shots. No "please don't do that" letters. I just sue the thief and prosecute the claim until the thief gets out his wallet and pays until it hurts.
No kidding.
I like your style WebWork! Can you represent someone in California?
We have directories where I seed it with typos, mythical cities, etc. We catch people all the time. It stemmed from college where to verify if the prof or TA actually read our work, we would insert a sentence in a paper to the effect of, "If you catch this line, I'll buy you lunch".
Our competitors have been lucky; we have not been as aggressive as we should be in nailing thieves. That's changing though. We just got one domain trademarked, and after 2 years and several grand in fees, we won't mess around anymore.
So get off you're @ss and do your own work. If not, you deserve to be sued for every dime you make on the site. As WebWork said, you don't know what a competitor is likely to do if you get caught.
There are places to find this info without stealing. Do a search for City/County Management and you can get a list of all city, county and state gov websites.
how can anyone believe that simple data like "Los Angeles, California" can be copyrighted?!
It cant. But most directory thieves dont want an ascii/CSV list. Your offer is generous.
Now, what you can use those DBs for is doing research. If he has a list of cities with some sort of food festival, and you are making a list of cities with some sort of food festival, start with the cities that you already know about.
Then you go out on the web and start doing your research. You can use his database to point you to the "facts" that you then verify. You go to the town's site about their festival. You then add these "facts" to your database. If you cannot find any othere information about the festival, don't list it.
While you might end up with exactly the same information, you did not copy it. The distinction is subtle, but it is there.
Do a search for City/County Management and you can get a list of all city, county and state gov websites.
If you've removed all the fake "gotcha!" data, added information of your own, and not relied too much on any one source, how could anyone prove that a compilation of facts is THEIR compilation of facts? Maybe that wouldn't stop them from suing, but they'd lose. But I bet their in-house lawyers would tell them not to--and instead to go after the provable cases, where someone HAD copied a collection of data word for word and introduced error for introduced error.
I have about 14K cities to do, so it is a big decision. Scrapping databases from other sites would speed up the process.
Matt, thanks for your offer. My sticky mail doesn't seem to work (i can send but not receive), how can i contact you?
depending on what he lifts, how he lifts it, what he does with it
A new work, that simply uses the old work as a basis for information leads upon which something new can be created, is a new work. Put differently, there's only so many new ways to say "Here's a list of the 50 States and their capitols." However, here's what he said:
What i have decided to do it use a combination of databases from different sites. And then check for each one for bogus items.
Sound like his "end around" isn't to lift an entire, single work, but instead to maybe take the 10 States from SiteA, 10 States from SiteB, etc.
Now, if what he lifts includes each database's particularized descriptions, their verbiage about how wonderful Dallas is in the Spring, well, then he's asking for trouble.
So, yes. A list of 50 States? Good luck proving you copied SiteA's list. 50 States and their capitols? Same response. Go futher and start lLifting verbal descriptions of the 50 States and likewise their capitols? Grab a little more data than city names and down you start to go.
Knock, knock, knock.
"Who is it?"
"Sherrif Jones! We have some papers you need to sign for."
I am only scrapping the cities names from several DB's - no other "unique" content.
Since i am creating a "unique" set from several sources i should be ok.
Even if i miss one bogus item and they call me on it, what are they going to do - they are going to look at the rest of the DB and see that it doesn't match theirs completely. Since they can't go after me for scrapping their complete DB, they could go after me on copying a bogus city name. What could the damages be for using a bogus city name since it didn't help my business?
[copyright.gov...]
Read it and come back and give a brief summary of what you learned that maybe opened your eyes just a little bit wider. No kidding. Read it (might take 1/2 hour or so) and then summarize the highlights (might take another 1/2). I'll bet there's a thing or two in there that might make you a bit wiser and more cautious.
Instead of rambling off about copyrights and all sorts of other legalese a simple link to a freely available database with a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license would seem to be more helpful.
This is in MySQL format:
[civicspacelabs.org...]
Hope this helps.
The original poster asked a specific question...
"If i copy his database and then add a few towns that he doesn't have and display the results in a similar fashion has he is, do i have any copyright issues to deal with?"
He didn't ask WHERE to get a DB, he specifically asked "do i have any copyright issues to deal with?"
He didn't ask WHERE to get a DB, he specifically asked "do i have any copyright issues to deal with?"
Yes, I saw that, but he was looking at the problem from the wrong angle as in copying it from someone else's web site and the answer is obviously YES.
I prefer to teach the man where to find his own material instead of explaining how to hire lawyers :)
rambling off about copyrights and all sorts of other legalese
Rambling? Legalese? Teach the man? Shakes head. Looks out window for a moment and then resumes dictating rambling multi-count civil action lawsuit pleadings full of legalese.
Matt, thanks for your offer. My sticky mail doesn't seem to work (i can send but not receive), how can i contact you?
If you can send a sticky email, do so. I can receive them. Otherwise, try looking in alt.www.webmaster on Usenet, and you'll find my (Matt Probert) email address - which I believe I am not allowed to post here?
Matt
So i wonder if competitor A is going after B. I wonder if i could find that out somehow.
[geonames.usgs.gov...]
Matt was very helpful and provided me with the list that i needed.
Thanks.
The owner of the company, an ex-geography prof, would overlay transparencies of competitors maps on top of our in-progress maps. We would pick out the new subdivisions that had been added, and trace them.
There was no threat of the competitor ever suing, even if they were the only ones to publish a map with that new subdivision, as street maps and other geographic data is public domain. You can't copyright reality.
Competitors (us included) would occaisonally add a fake street here or there just to see who's copying who, but unless you scan their map verbatim and use the same graphics to represent the streets, they have no legal grounds to sue you.
Forget some of the lawyer-talk scaremongering, geographic data in it's simplest form is FFA.
Paulo (Psazf)
Lisbon, Portugal
