On Aug 12, 1:13*pm, Ivor The Engine
wrote:

On Wed, 11 Aug 2010 14:00:18 -0700 (PDT), Mizter T
wrote:
Ignoring Advance tickets (or at least their availability), the Avantix
Traveller supposedly has all available fares in its database already
(plus rather a lot of noise too) - of course, it comes with strict
instructions not to even think about trying to reverse engineer it,
but I wonder if one could legitimately automatically query it - though
quite possibly the licence forbids that too (haven't checked, it's not
installed on this machine wot I is using).

It's a pretty standard copyright notice:

© Copyright of Atos Origin 2010. All rights reserved. *
The copyright in this work is vested in Atos Origin and the
information contained herein is confidential. This work (either in
whole or in part) must not be modified, reproduced, disclosed or
disseminated to others or used for purposes other than that for which
it is supplied, without the prior written permission of Atos Origin.
If this work or any part hereof is furnished to a third party by
virtue of a contract with that party, use of this work by such party
shall be governed by the express contractual terms between the Atos
Origin company which is a party to that contract and the said party.

IANAL but to me 'reproduced, disclosed or disseminated to others'
would prohibit using the Avantix data set to populate queries outside
of the application. *In other words, the fares themselves are not the
property of Atos Origin, but their compliation of them is. *Discuss.

I suppose one could put forward some argument about the 'purpose for
which it is supplied' - i.e. it's supplied to provide fares
information - as per this sentence:

"This work (either in whole or in part) must not be modified,
reproduced, disclosed or disseminated to others or used for purposes
other than that for which it is supplied [...]"

I doubt that'd get very far though.

The bit about not disclosing or disseminating to others could almost
be read as to mean that you can't tell anyone else about the results
you get from Avantix Traveller! So all those posters who copy and
paste fare restrictions details verbatim from the program are arguably
breaking the licence.

Going back to the database mining idea, I suppose one could just kinda
ignore the licence - after all lots of technological progress has
happened in spite of various bits of intellectual property law...

(The latter point is of course devilishly complex on many levels and
cuts several ways - for example, I'm not entirely sure a career as a
novelist will be quite so rewarding in say ten or twenty years time
when e-book readers have really taken off, and hackers really get to
work on the associated e-book DRM systems. Not of course that a great
many novelists' careers are that rewarding at present!)