March 19th, 2008

When ToS Enforce the Word of God

Developers know that it’s a good idea to carefully read the terms of service (ToS) for APIs you use. However, it’s all too easy to ignore a ToS as nothing more than legal boilerplate.

Occasionally, you find some pretty unusual terms. Consider the ESV Bible Lookup API, mentioned in a previous story on New APIs: Games, Shopping and the Bible. Among the conditions of use for the API are the following statements:

This service is available for use only by individuals and non-commercial organizations that use the service in ways consistent with the historic Christian understanding of doctrine and the Bible, as summarized in the following foundational doctrines….You agree to maintain the moral integrity, spirit, fervor, and consistency in message that is inherent in the nature of the ESV Bible. This means that your use is consistent with the above statement of faith and that you give proper attribution.

It’s probably safe to say that few APIs require this level of moral introspection to use. How can one even tell that you are complying with these conditions? Ultimately, there may be no need to answer this question since there is a condition of use that trumps all others:

We reserve the right to cancel your access to the service at any time for any reason.

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Posted by Raymond Yee as APIs, Law at 2:37 AM | No Comments »

January 16th, 2008

USAspending.gov: You Will be Watched

We recently added this new API listing to the US government site USAspending.gov which provides API access to budget data, but we didn’t notice a detail which one of our readers did: that there’s a somewhat intimidating, red-text warning on the homepage that says:

WARNING: This is a United States Federal Government computer system that is “FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY.” This system is subject to monitoring. Therefore, no expectation of privacy is to be assumed. Individuals found performing unauthorized activities are subject to disciplinary action including criminal prosecution. Click here for more information.

In his blog post Coby Logen points to a variety of potential issues and inconsistencies in the site:

• “For Official Use Only” — This means the information is sensitive, but unclassified. If this is true, then USASpending.gov contains information that should not be released to the public.
• No expectation of privacy — This is in direct conflict with the website’s privacy policy, which opens: “the privacy of USASpending.gov customers is of utmost importance.” It also says that no personally-identifying information is automatically collected when you visit USASpending.gov. The warning and the privacy policy cannot both be correct.
• Unauthorized activities — What exactly would be unauthorized? If the information on the site really is “For official use only”, then it is unauthorized for a private citizen to even access the information.

And later on notes that:

Although there are other ways to get federal budget information, the warning on USASpending.gov is unfortunate, because it is wrong and it violates federal policy. USASpending.gov does not meet the definition of “For Official Use Only”; it contains public information. There is an expectation of privacy; no personally-identifying information is collected from visitors. The warning conflicts with OMB Memoranda, which require each government site to “post clear privacy policies” and adhere to them, because the warning significantly obscures and confuses the site’s privacy policy.

Coby’s post points out a variety of good alternatives including the Sunlight Foundation who provide the same data via the Fedspending.org API as well resources on our Government API Dashboard.

In the meantime, you’ve been warned.

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Posted by John Musser as Gov, Issues, Law at 3:49 AM | 6 Comments »

January 15th, 2008

Hasbro Versus Scrabulous

For the third time in as many weeks a Facebook application is the subject of controversy (the other two being the Facebook Hoax and the Facebook Spyware). This time around the news comes via Fortune’s Josh Quittner who reports that Hasbro, the company behind Scrabble, wants to shut down the popular web site and Facebook app Scrabulous. Scrabulous started in 2006 when two bothers, Jayant and Rajat Agarwalla, created the Scrabble knockoff out of their home in Calcutta, India. It did well that first year but really took off after they ported it to Facebook in June of last year.How popular is it? It’s the 9th most popular Facebook application, has 2.3 million active users and 500K using it every day. And according the Fortune report it has revenues of about $25,000 a month.

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Posted by John Musser as Facebook, Issues, Law, Popular, Social at 12:42 AM | 1 Comment »

January 4th, 2008

YottaMusic and the Limits of APIs

Web APIs rarely do everything the underlying site or service does. They are typically a defined subset of the total functionality. While understandable from a business strategy and resource perspective, these limits can be frustrating for developers. Sometimes this leads them to find a solution using undocumented APIs, often services used by the UI of the site, that provides them enough functionality to meet their needs (which was essentially the case with the original Google Maps, an undocumented JavaScript API until Paul Rademacher reverse engineered them and built HousingMaps.com).

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Posted by John Musser as Featured, Issues, Law, Music at 2:31 AM | 1 Comment »

December 12th, 2007

MapSpammers Coming to Mashups?

Earlier this year in Beware Mashup Spam we saw how spammers were working on gaming Google Maps via mass uploads and creating questionable or false listings. Well, Search Engine Land’s Mike Blumenthal has just followed-up on his initial report with more in yesterday’s MapSpammers Getting More Sophisticated.

In a nutshell, Mike reports on get rich quick schemes in which the spammer uses post office boxes in any city to “legitimize” themselves and get ranking in Google Maps. The overall scheme is to: “Rent a mailing address with forwarding in every major market near the centroid of the city (UPS is one of many that offer this service); Obtain a domain name for each city with a relevant “location + service” domain; Create a website that returns an optimized “location + service” page for the domain; Enter the businesses in the Google Local Business Center (if you are doing the top 50 metro markets, not such a big deal) note: skip this and the next step if using Yahoo Local; Enter the PIN numbers when they are forwarded to you; Get rich quick.”

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Posted by John Musser as Google, Issues, Law, Mapping, Money, Popular at 2:15 AM | 4 Comments »

November 12th, 2007

Legal Issues for Mashups

As you can see in our news archive under the topic “law” there are lots of unresolved questions when it comes to the legal issues around mashups and APIs. In an interesting session at yesterday’s MashupCamp Dublin many of these issues were discussed. Clare Dillon took good notes, here’s a brief summary:

• What about terms and conditions for mashups? Within website terms and conditions you can write whatever you want but that does not necessarily mean they can be held as binding. Nor can you hide your terms in eight point script because there is a legal duty for you as a provider to make it clear. For example, consumers can argue that certain clauses are illegal because they have been hidden. ote that most jurisdiction have a concept of ‘offer’ but because laws vary by country it might be that someone Russia doesn’t have to comply. This can make it difficult to enforce enforce terms and conditions globally. For mashup developers they need to read the terms and conditions of the APIs and sources they are using in order to make sure they comply as well as forward them appropriately to their users.
• “Fair use” terms and conditions allow for the use of data to parody but not using it for commercial reasons. Many mashups risk running afoul of this.

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Posted by John Musser as Issues, Law, Popular at 3:53 AM | 1 Comment »

October 9th, 2007

Can an API Steal Data?

In a very lively forum thread over at Flickr there’s a discussion/debate about the Flickr API, data ownership, copyright, and mashups. In a nutshell, a Flickr member, Austen Haines, noticed that some of his photos were appearing in the mashup Adactio Elsewhere even though he had flagged them All Rights Reserved (ARR). The mashup developer, Jeremy Keith, replied and noted that this was just the behavior of the API and that it “sounds like there’s a glitch in the system”. The discussion is still ongoing, and the initial thread kicked-off a second thread, this with the provacative title Flickr photos stolen by the thousands through the Flickr API. (And interesting to note that our Adactio mashup profile is one of the earliest mashups listed on ProgrammableWeb and is consistently ranked in the top 20 of our all-time most popular mashups.)

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Posted by John Musser as Issues, Law, PopularAllTime, Security, Yahoo, photo at 12:51 AM | 5 Comments »

June 18th, 2007

Craigslist Blocks Mashup Listpic

In another dust-up over a mashup taking data by screen-scraping, the classifieds listings giant Craigslist has blocked access to its site from Listpic, a useful mashup that enhances Craigslist listings by adding-in associated photos. If you check our existing Listpic mashup profile you can see it has been a very popular application and is 5-star rated by our readers:

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Posted by John Musser as Issues, Law, PopularAllTime, Shopping at 12:10 AM | 7 Comments »

January 18th, 2007

Making Money From Mashups

A well attended Mashup Camp session hosted by Stephen O’Grady of Redmonk and StrikeIron’s Dave Nielsen lead to an active discussion on questions and issues around commercialization and business issues of APIs and mashups. Below are my rough notes from the session.

• How are developer ecosystems best managed. Analogy made to old Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) as a model of a classic, well-run developer program.
• Concern from couple audience members about lack of responsiveness from API vendors. If I’m running a business, who do I talk to? Usually when they’re small the providers don’t respond to them. Sometimes developers have choices: easier to swap providers (ex one map provider to another), sometimes no alternatives.

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Posted by John Musser as BestPractices, Events, Issues, Law, Money, PopularAllTime at 12:05 AM | 11 Comments »

January 12th, 2007

eBay API and Copyright Violations

eBay has recently enhanced their API to allow intellectual property owners to report violations programmatically. A set of three APIs let Verified Rights Owners (VeRO) Program particpants to track and report items that infringe on IP copyright

This story at AuctionBytes points-out that eBay has been sued by IP rights holders like Tiffany claiming that eBay was not doing enough to prevent this type of fraud and violation.

You can view our eBay API profile here.

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Posted by John Musser as Issues, Law at 10:18 AM | 3 Comments »