Is it legal to pull information from 3rd party sites for use in commercial software?


If you create a software product that will be sold, is it legal to extract data from 3rd party sites for use in the software?

For example, regarding marketing software…when they pull results from Google, Alexa, Compete.com and so on and then display that data within desktop software to the end user…is that legal/allowed?

Or what about applications that pull data from sites like Google Shopping, Yahoo News, Shopping.com, etc.

Thank you and I appreciate your help.

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Posted in Programming Design |

One Response

  1. Prime8 Says:
    February 27th, 2009 at 2:12 pm

    I think that an application that just provides access to publicly available material should be fine. Isn’t that what a web browser or a feed reader does?

    If you’re accessing a web service, however, you probably need to follow the rules in the license agreement.