Legality of harvesting public websites in an opensource application

Question

The question is about a free and open source product which allows users to catalog and organize their personal ebook collection. The book's info could be harvested from various websites (amazon, B&N, etc.) via ISBN queries.

I was wondering if there are legal issues for developing such a product, in regards to violating "terms of use" of such websites.

I assume some of the info is public and not copyrighted, i.e. title, authors names and publisher. What about cover images, description, and reviews?

Could the developers be sued for such a product and how can they legally protect themselves?

Answer 1

I was wondering if there are legal issues for developing such a product, in regards to violating "terms of use" of such websites.

The legal issue would be violating the terms of use.

I assume some of the info is public and not copyrighted, i.e. title, authors names and publisher. What about cover images, description, and reviews?

Doesn't really matter, if you are already violating the terms of use. However, even if you weren't, such wholesale mining probably doesn't constitute "fair use;" even if individual elements are not copyrighted in isolation, the web pages themselves probably are.

Could the developers be sued?

Always a possibility.

how can they legally protect themselves?

By asking for permission in writing first from the website in question, and by getting advice from a lawyer who specializes in copyright and contract law.

Some websites actually allow limited data mining. Check with Amazon and Google about this. In addition, I believe there are some web services out there that provide services similar to the ones you are describing. They are the same services that provide thumbnails in Winamp; if you find such a service, you may not need to screen-scrape Amazon at all.

Answer 2

Everything written anywhere in the last 70-some years, is copyrighted by the simple fact it was created. People can place the copyright in the public domain (or assign the copyright to someone else), or they can choose to license the work with a permissive license, but it's still copyrighted.

You can be sued for any thing at any time. You may be able to successfully defend yourself. If you're violating explicit Terms of Service, you'll have something of an uphill battle.

If all you did was write some software, you probably have a good defense. If you operate the software in a way that infringes on copyrights, you'll be in trouble. The caveat is if your software circumvents some kind of DRM. Then you never even have to run it -- just giving it to someone (I think that's the standard) can create liability under the DMCA.

In short: If you're not sure, ask a real lawyer, not SO.

Answer 3

Just FYI, several collection managers (for books, e-books, movies) like Alexandria, calibre and GCstar are doing what you are describing to so I guess it's somewhat allowed as long as you don't violate the terms of use of the exposed APIs.