copyright software india data-ownership indian-penal-code
Data scraping with an App and copyright violations (India)
<p>During my college days, I developed an Android App for my university. I used the university logo and data scraped from their website to show results of respective students. It's a government university.</p>

<p>Today I received a call from the university that they are going to register a police case against me. Did I do any thing wrong? Will I be prosecuted for this?</p>

<p>There was no financial benefit for me from this App.</p>

<p>Yes, you did something wrong; you used both the university's trade mark and copyright without their permission.</p>

<p>I don't know the law in India, however, if it is similar to Australia it is unlikely that the police will be interested in doing anything about it. While it <em>is</em> technically a crime, criminal prosecution is usually reserved for egregious breaches on a for profit basis.</p>

<p>I suggest you apologise and agree to stop distributing your app.</p>

<p>It doesn’t matter if you have or have not made money from the app. The university logo belongs to that university. As for the data I don’t think it would cause you trouble as the data cannot be copyrightable. In general, you can take data or even scrape data from publicly available websites as long as you are certain that it is not copyrighted. Some websites tend to put terms and conditions that prevent you from scraping data but from a legal perspective it will not hold as that data needs to be copyrightable data in order for it to hold in court. And Indian copyright law does covers only works such as literally work such as personally written content, performances, software code, etc. Student marks may not really belong to the university as that data belongs to each individual student so I don’t think you’ll be in trouble for that. However, this could be considered private data if you had to “hack” into the university site to obtain it. Otherwise you’re good. The only issue I see is you using the university logo on your app. For now, I would recommend you take down the logo and if police ask you could simply tell them that you took it down when the university told you it’s illegal. As for the data, I would still recommend you to get advice from a lawyer, just in case.</p>
