patrickjdempsey wrote:And you are a lawyer specializing in technology and copyright? Sorry Charlie but you have no idea what you are talking about. Scraping URL's with Wireshark is not even remotely the same thing as a public-facing URL, and even if it was public they have the right to charge for access to their servers to get data that they compiled and interpreted. Not only that, but Samsung probably pays a pretty penny for that access and so that is Samsung's data we are talking about. This isn't TOR or some "warez" site where anything goes.
Are you a lawyer specializing in this, because I don't think you know what you're talking about here. I used WireShark to discover the URL that the widget on my phone uses, but the URL is not protected in any way. The entire premise that the web is built around requires that the onus is on the server to simply not serve the content if they don't want you to have it. There is no such thing as a public-facing vs private-facing URL in reality (other than an internal, intranet, that simply doesn't face the whole internet because it's served on a 10.x/192.168.x.x type address). You can't just declare that this URL is somehow different than http://www.google.com/ -- if the server returns a result for a request, the fact that it returned the request IS the authorization that you need to be authorized to *view and read* the content. Copyright law can still come into play with your ability to re-distribute content, but again, you can't label a URL as private and tell people to just not access it.
Again, I stand behind what I said as 100% true for the USA - facts are not copyrightable, and URLs are not private.
And anyway, I wasn't saying to use the samsung URL in ForecastFox live, I was saying it would be a good way to reference basic translations for common strings, and use those with a hard-coded internal string lookup table.
Also, the samsung URL is the "legacy API", which is the same format that ForecastFox uses still. I believe the Legacy API was free, and AccuWeather is only now trying to charge for their newer API in JSON format. Samsung is probably not paying anything to use it, in fact, as big as Samsung is, AccuWeather probably paid Samsung to include the widget on the home screen of every Galaxy S1-S6 and Galaxy Note phone by default, because it generates traffic to AccuWeather's website.