[forrestthewoods]

Isn't a key part of copyright lawsuits damages? Let's say, for example, that the school did sue him for copyright infringement. Then let's say they win the lawsuit. It is in fact copyright. Now what? I believe he'd have to take it down and then pay damages. What, exactly, would the financial damages to a public institution be? Hell, even if it was a private school what type of damages could you possibly argue for this type of app?

Now he is selling the app so profiting off of someone else's copyrighted work is pretty much a no go. But what if he gave it away for free? What the result of a copyright lawsuit be exactly?

[Alupis]

No copyright law (in any country that I'm aware of, even if the OP sold the app) has been violated.

The OP may be subject to some school policy... but that's it. The administration is plain wrong and the OP should pursue his app if he can withstand the administrations push-back/threats.

You can always link-to and/or provide access to existing work (copyrighted or not) so long as you provide proper attribution (state the original content authors/creators)

[luka-birsa]

I'm not certain that linking and providing access is the same. Let's take a copyrighted work which we can relate to more easily than web pages - TV Shows on Hulu.

Now, you can always link to Hulu in your browser and direct your visitors to Hulu. Hulu as the (C) holder can then decide if you're geographically suitable to recieve this content.

How about building a proxy webpage that provides access to Hulu (let's call it EU-Hulu)? We'll build a complete Hulu clone that works in EU by tunneling video streams via VPN to our page and stream them from our web video players.

I don't think that adding attribuition (ie providing a "THIS CONTENT IS FROM HULU" and their logo) to the page would solve our legal problems. If anybody can confirm that this is in fact legal, I know what I'll be developing in the near future: EU-HULU, EU-Spotify, EU-...

Copyright law is very very very strict. If it's not explicitely stated it's forbidden. Even by taking code from a pastie repository, where it's clearly made public, you're braking the authors Copyright unless he specifies Licensing terms that allows you to copy paste it into your app. Source code for all closed source software could be made public and that doesn't mean you're allowed to use it in any way.

To go even further - Hulu, while it openly shares video content to US citizens is unavailable to the rest of the world. We all know that you can bypass the limitation by employing VPN, but you're breaking the Copyright law nontheless. It's their choice if they want to limit access to their copyrighted materials.

If OP built a Web browser clone, he would be in the clear. He instead took data from the webpage, mangled it into his own app and sold it for 0.99$. Now while I do not agree with the tactics employed by the school (they should embrace it instead), image we would be talking about Wikipedia and 6.99$ BestEncyclopedia app, developed by Apple, which downloads the data and presents it a very nice way (they'd call it Cylopedia-Flow with huge images and Helvetica all the way).

Right now you'd be very pissed at Apple.

[clarry]

> How about building a proxy webpage that provides access to Hulu (let's call it EU-Hulu)? We'll build a complete Hulu clone that works in EU by tunneling video streams via VPN to our page and stream them from our web video players.

This is not at all comparable to the OP's app, which (if I've understood the post correctly) is a special purpose HTTP client. If its user can use that app to get the data he wants, then he can also use a normal browser. It's using the user's credentials. There is no middle man tapping into a restricted stream and republishing that to the world.

> image we would be talking about Wikipedia and 6.99$ BestEncyclopedia app, developed by Apple, which downloads the data and presents it a very nice way (they'd call it Cylopedia-Flow with huge images and Helvetica all the way).

> Right now you'd be very pissed at Apple.

Nope. There are many wikipedia clones already. There is nothing wrong with them. And there are many special purpose http clients to show specific sites in a user friendly way. Nothing wrong with them.