Can I legally present data from public API&#39;s on a website? I am in the process of creating a website that will use data to present information on publicly traded companies. The tools that will present this data will be free to use and I will never charge a fee to use them. I am accessing the data through various API's that I have found through my research. All of the API's are free to use. If my website increases in popularity, and I monetize the website through advertisements, will I be breaking any copyright/intellectual-property laws?
"I am accessing the data through various API's that I have found through my research. All of the API's are free to use." The API's you "found" and are using may be "free" in a monetary sense - i.e., you don't pay for them and they appear to be public information - but those APIs will have a Terms of Service (TOS) attached to the use of the APIs and the data by the company which provides the APIs. A Terms of service (TOS) (Wikipedia) outlines the legal and acceptable use of the API and is a legally binding contract. Those TOSs may very well restrict the access and end usage of the data, so read the TOS for each API. A TOS is a contract; break the contract - by accessing the data without permission, without a license, by selling the data, or by any other activity expressly restricted - and you open yourself up to possible legal action, which could include copyright and trademark violations, among others. At very least, the companies that run the APIs can deny you access if you break the TOS; at very most, they can sue you. A company being "publicly traded" doesn't mean all the data about those companies is free and publicly accessible. Some may be; other data is compiled by the company which provides the API, and they can restrict access to that data through their TOS. If certain types of data are indeed factual - facts can't be copyrighted - the TOS may still legally restrict usage, because the company developed and owns the format that the data is presented in and the API the data is accessed by. It's possible that you could enter into a licensing agreement with the company that provides the API so you can access the data and monetize it, but that's up to the company, you and your lawyer.
Pretty much everything you need to know about the ownership and licensing of your material on Medium is in the Medium TOS you contractually agreed to when you signed up with the service. Basically, you granted Medium a license to use the work, but you did not agree to an exclusive license nor turn over copyright to them. Part of that Terms of Service – Medium Policy reads: Content rights &amp; responsibilities You own the rights to the content you create and post on Medium. By posting content to Medium, you give us a nonexclusive license to publish it on Medium Services, including anything reasonably related to publishing it (like storing, displaying, reformatting, and distributing it). In consideration for Medium granting you access to and use of the Services, you agree that Medium may enable advertising on the Services, including in connection with the display of your content or other information. We may also use your content to promote Medium, including its products and content. We will never sell your content to third parties without your explicit permission. You’re responsible for the content you post. This means you assume all risks related to it, including someone else’s reliance on its accuracy, or claims relating to intellectual property or other legal rights. You’re welcome to post content on Medium that you’ve published elsewhere, as long as you have the rights you need to do so. By posting content to Medium, you represent that doing so doesn’t conflict with any other agreement you’ve made. By posting content you didn’t create to Medium, you are representing that you have the right to do so. For example, you are posting a work that’s in the public domain, used under license (including a free license, such as Creative Commons), or a fair use. We can remove any content you post for any reason. You can delete any of your posts, or your account, anytime. Processing the deletion may take a little time, but we’ll do it as quickly as possible. We may keep backup copies of your deleted post or account on our servers for up to 14 days after you delete it. Pertaining to presenting Medium content in an iFrame on another site, this is reasonably close to not allowing that: You may not do, or try to do, the following: ... (2) access or search the Services by any means other than the currently available, published interfaces (e.g., APIs) that we provide;... You can use Embed Code Generator | Embedly to embed an iFrame of a Medium page on another site. But contacting Medium via the email at the bottom of the TOS would tell you for sure if it is OK. Comments on your pieces on Medium do belong to the owner. And You own the rights to the content you create and post on Medium. appears to cover the idea of copying your material from Medium to your own site. If in doubt, ask them.
You probably can. There are a few questions here. First, is the message protected by copyright? In general, it probably is, but there are many exceptions that might allow you to use it without permission. Unfortunately, these exceptions vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. The exceptions tend to allow the use of small excerpts of a work for various sorts of purposes that don't undermine the copyright holder's ability to profit. That leads to the second question, which is why you are using that message. If you're including it in your source code so you can test whether a message generated at run time is in fact that message, that's one thing, and it's probably okay. On the other hand, if the owner of the copyright sells a database of all its message strings, and you're compiling a similar database that you also intend to sell, that's probably not okay. A third question concerns the Firefox license terms. It's entirely possible that they allow you explicitly to do what you're considering, in which case it doesn't matter what copyright law says about it. On the other hand, Firefox is open source software, and under some open source licenses, if you incorporate any of the source code in your own product, you are required to release your product's source code under the same license. If you're not already planning to do that, you should consider carefully whether including that error message would trigger that provision (if there is one) of Firefox's open source license.
Probably not. There are potential problems on the levels of copyright, data protection, and the Youtube terms of service. You should assume that comments are typically covered by copyright. You do not have a license to these comments, only YouTube does. Therefore, YouTube can show the comments but you can't copy them – just like YouTube can stream your videos but others can't download them and host them on their own websites. To cover the copyright angle, you'd either need to obtain a license from the commenters, or get a sub-license from YouTube, or identify a suitable copyright exception. The comments are personal data within the meaning of the GDPR, so that your processing of these comments (including mere storage) would be subject to GDPR as well. You need a legal basis for processing personal data. Which legal basis is suitable would depend on the purpose of processing, and on your relationship with the commenters. Potentially applicable legal bases in this context: you have a contract with the commenters that requires you to show the comments on your website. For example, I could see such a contract if there were a “featured comment” perk for a Patreon subscription. But this is not going to fly with random commenters. you have a legitimate interest (LI) that allows the processing. A LI requires that you conduct a balancing test where you weigh this interest against the commenter's rights. This is very specific to the purposes for which you want to show the comments. However, a LI will generally only apply if you have an existing relationship with the commenters, making it possible for them to expect that this processing will occur – unlikely if you'll be scraping comments from YouTube. you have obtained consent from the data subject. Consent must be specific, informed, freely given, and unambiguous – you can't obtain consent by writing “by commenting under this video you consent to XXX” in the video description. Regardless of legal basis, you would have to inform the commenters under Art 14 GDPR when you scrape their comments from the platform. Finally, consider the platform terms of service. I have not read the YouTube ToS recently, so I don't know what their specific conditions are. But in general, such ToS will not allow you to scrape content from their platform in order to host it somewhere else. The ToS might allow certain actions like embedding a link/iframe to such videos on other sites, without allowing other actions such as copying other user's content to your site.
This seems to be a mix of question about law and a meta-question about this site, but I'll treat it as an on-topic question about law. The author of a question, or answer, owns the copyright to their contributions, and they can re-publish to their heart's content. Any user who posts here grants a license to SE and other users to use content posted here, so I don't have to ask you permission to quote you. As part of the permission granted by SE to use this website, you have agreed to &quot;follow the rules&quot; set by SE. There are many rules, some spelled out more clearly that others. For example, if you post a question, you indirectly agreed that your content can be upvoted or down-voted. Certain content can be &quot;closed&quot; and deleted, when the content is deemed to violate the rules in particular ways (is spam, porn, abuse, or judged to be poor-quality). Judgment (on different matters) can be rendered by community managers, moderators, or other users. The agreement is here, see especially here. If we take the post that you linked to, it is quite possible that it was deleted because it is not a general legal question, in violation of the acceptable use policy. If you want a historical analysis of your particular case, it should be asked on Law Meta.
I've found Google's filtering based on licence to not be very reliable, at least not reliable enough to trust from a practical legal perspective. Using a photo that you don't own the copyright to is a risk. You may be infringing copyright by doing so. The owner may eventually ask you to stop, or they may sue you for damages. Further, some copyright infringement is criminal 17 USC 506. In my opinion, it would be unwise to use a work commercially that you don't affirmatively know you have permission to use.
"...the listing ad of property is not a property of website." Why do you think that? Just because a website exists does not mean you can legally scrape it. Read the Terms of Service of the site; there is a good chance the TOS forbids scraping or copying of any part of the website in any manner, including scraping. If the property listings are from a third party service that provides real estate listings to websites, then those property listings are licensed to that website, and by scraping them you will likely be violating the TOSs of those two services. By illegally scraping the content of a website, you are opening yourself up to being involved in copyright infringement and/or being liable to be the subject of a civil lawsuit.
There seems to be no controversy about whether you are allowed to make a copy of a publicly accessible GitHub repository by forking it. As they agreed by accepting the GitHub terms of service and making their repository public, the repository owner grants that and a few other rights to all GitHub users. The actual question seems to be whether you may then publish the URL of your fork. Of course you may, to the same extent that you may publish anything else. The URL is data, not a creative work, so copyright does not apply to it. The considerations are the same as for publishing URL of the original repo. There are things you might say about the URL or the repository it identifies that could get you into trouble, such as claiming rights you do not have, or misrepresenting the rights that others have or that you can grant to them. Or publishing false and derogatory remarks about the code might conceivably land you in hot water. But the URL itself is not an issue.