As of May 31, 2023, we have updated our Code of Conduct.

Hot answers tagged

8 votes

Do some Kaggle contest organizers remove the data sets after the end of the contest?

In my understanding the data of Kaggle contests remain available indefinitely each with their own rules for sharing and publication. However, I only know of one instance where the data was removed. ...
wacax's user avatar
  • 1,012
6 votes
Accepted

Guidelines on surveying email addresses in the public domain?

Yes there are laws about spam: here's for the US, here are some links about Europe spam laws. I'm pretty sure that in France (not sure about other countries), unsolicited commercial emails are ...
Terpo's user avatar
  • 1,157
5 votes

What gives people the right to license factual data?

Literal answer The Sui generis database right. It is a property right granted in several countries to creators, compilers or curators of databases. Prose answer To address your single points, here ...
ojdo's user avatar
  • 2,804
4 votes
Accepted

Legality of using data against terms

here's more of an opinion, not an answer: i'm free software all the way, and i wouldn't give a care to what their terms say, i'd do whatever i pleased with it, until they killed the service. in ...
albert's user avatar
  • 11.8k
4 votes

Cases where open data has been removed?

Here's an example from the NIH in 2008. Basically, the NIH learned that in some cases a clever algorithm could identify medical patients from two sets of open medical data. This is an early case in ...
claude's user avatar
  • 41
4 votes

Cases where open data has been removed?

One you'll probably remember - Wikimedia released (CC0) search logs in 2012, realised they were insufficiently anonymised, and took them down the same day: https://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/09/19/what-...
Andrew's user avatar
  • 803
4 votes

Can I take "open data" from a website like Quandl, modify it, and then resell it to clients?

The key question to ask whenever using data from an API or other source is "what licence is attached to the data?" Quandl doesn't give any definitive answer, but it points to the original dataset's ...
puntofisso's user avatar
4 votes
Accepted

Where can I find a dataset containing legal documents?

CFPB Credit Card Agreements DB I think that is a service contract. docracy - open source legal contracts Requires sign up
albert's user avatar
  • 11.8k
3 votes

Where can I find a dataset containing legal documents?

This dataset contains labeled and unlabeled legal contracts for contract element extraction. The labeled dataset POS tags as well as annotations for different contract elements. You can refer to the ...
Alok Ranjan's user avatar
3 votes
Accepted

Does this violate copyright of music/lyrics/sound?

As long as you don't keep the song anywhere on your servers, and have clear warnings "Do not transform songs that you are not allowed to transform", I believe you don't risk that much. You are just an ...
Nicolas Raoul's user avatar
  • 8,286
3 votes
Accepted

sports-reference.com legality of using their data for other applications

The TOS are quite explicit you can't use their data without their consent and buy having a license. Any use, reproduction, or distribution of this Site or Content without SRL's advance written ...
magdmartin's user avatar
  • 1,545
3 votes

Do some Kaggle contest organizers remove the data sets after the end of the contest?

The rules are different for different problems. Having been active for some time now, this is what I've observed (Note: I play with completed competitions too for practise, and I personally haven't ...
Dawny33's user avatar
  • 262
3 votes

Guidelines on surveying email addresses in the public domain?

Not a direct answer to the legal question, but... If you send any unsolicited email then to prevent your sending address/domain being marked as a spammer, you should use an emailing service. Once you ...
philshem's user avatar
  • 17.5k
3 votes

Cases where open data has been removed?

Not sure if this fits your requirement, but the Enron Email Dataset comes to mind. There are multiple locations where you can learn about the dataset, i.e. here: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~./enron/ The ...
pgruetter's user avatar
  • 131
3 votes

Cases where open data has been removed?

I can think of one instance that once open data was subsequently removed from public use in future iterations. Unfortunately I don't remember the specifics, but it involved the outcome of trials for ...
Kotebiya's user avatar
  • 2,959
3 votes
Accepted

Is it legal to publish under CC-BY-SA a picture of a recent sculpture in Japan?

This is not really an "open data" question, but... The answer is "you are not allowed to do this"; Japan does not allow commercial photography of otherwise copyrighted artistic works in public places,...
Andrew's user avatar
  • 803
3 votes
Accepted

Looking for datasets of complaints/requests filed at municipalities or cities

US City Open Data Census results for Service Requests should have what you need. And there's always Open 311, though I'm pretty sure its implementers will overlap with the census results. There is ...
albert's user avatar
  • 11.8k
3 votes

Is Open Government data ever restricted to use within the country of origin?

Yes - see NASA's software for an example. The release type determines who can have a NASA software code. If you meet the access criteria for the code (as defined below), NASA can transfer the ...
APH's user avatar
  • 131
2 votes

Crime rate data for American cities

This is similar to another question, and so I'll post a more detailed and updated answer here that might be useful, too. There are quite a few cities that publish this data. A quick way to find it, ...
Jeanne Holm's user avatar
  • 4,517
2 votes
Accepted

Issues with collecting a data set via crowd-sourcing

Crowd-sourcing businesses name/hours/number is a big part of what Wikivoyage does, and they have been doing that successfully for quite some time, so their case is worth studying. They state their ...
Nicolas Raoul's user avatar
  • 8,286
2 votes

Cases where open data has been removed?

Social Media APIs are prime examples here; literally most of them have done this, with the exception of flickr. Details differ for each, but essentially these companies make API consumption easy/...
albert's user avatar
  • 11.8k
2 votes

Employer's website is "web scraping" from another site, can I be liable even though I did not write that code?

I would have to disagree with the other answer. It has got to do with a lot more than that. Did your employer at the time know his website was scraping? If so, you are in no trouble at all. Writing ...
vincent kleine's user avatar
2 votes

Employer's website is "web scraping" from another site, can I be liable even though I did not write that code?

Firstly, the information provided in my answers is for general information purposes only and is not intended to be legal advice for individual situations and should not be relied on in taking legal ...
Shawn Mehan's user avatar
2 votes

The "right to mine" and scraping the web in EU

The article in the LSE blog you have pointed out seems to be a good overview, the problems seem to be not only UK specific: Even with some legal barriers now removed, technical barriers remain ...
2 votes

Collecting data on private rooftop characteristics?

In Australia, a federal government agency (PSMA) has created a for-cost dataset called Geoscape that calculates information on private rooftops: specifically roof heights and materials. I wanted to ...
Anthony Joseph's user avatar
2 votes

Types of license for OpenData

In the OpenDefinition site which is part of the OpenKnowledge Foundation, there is a list of licenses that can be considered as OpenData, and it indicates in which cases it should be used: http://...
AngocA's user avatar
  • 163
2 votes
Accepted

Contact information (including email) for all US state legislators

Open States has all of this information. Here's contact information, including email for one of my senators. You could scrape them or use their API.
albert's user avatar
  • 11.8k
2 votes
Accepted

Is there an API to get the legality of alcohol (or legal drinking age) by geo location?

One option is to use a Github repo (fork your own) that other users can contribute to, which will help keep it up to date. https://github.com/aihpos/drinkingage/blob/master/drinking.csv Although ...
philshem's user avatar
  • 17.5k

Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible