Re: What is the state of syndicated stock quote info?

["Laird Popkin" <laird.popkin@sothebys.com>]

Reuters syndicates all of their feeds in their Internet Delivery 
Service (using ICE and NewsML), which should include stock quotes. Of 
course, you have to pay for it.

Knowing the companies that provide the actual stock data, I'd be 
extremely surprised if it were legal for Yahoo to redistribute stock 
quotes. They (or at least their legal department) must not know about 
those tools.

On the topic of "screen scraping" -- web sites pay for their content, 
and (aside from content they create themselves) almost certainly
don't 
have the legal right to redistribute it. If screen scraping becomes 
widespread, there are some pretty aweful likely reprecussions:

- web sites will get sued unless they take precautions against screen 
scraping. For example, Yahoo (if they hear about it) would almost 
certainly have to force CPAN to remove those libraries, and rework 
their web pages to break the copies in distribution.
- content syndicators will force subscribers to implement technology 
to prevent screen scraping. This is a losing battle, but will waste a 
lot of time and money along the way.
- content syndicators will raise their rates for content to cover the 
losses due to resyndication.
- if people starting going to the "scraping" sites instead of the 
original sites, those sites are, in effect, stealing advertising 
revenue based on the value of the content.
- if sites start getting jumpy about controlling their content (i.e. 
it grows to a scale where lawyers get involved) a lot of really cool 
applications will get squashed.

In case anyone wants to argue morality, content producers pay people 
to produce the content, which they then sell to their customers (web 
sites, newspapers, etc.). If illegal redistribution becomes 
widespread, these people will be seriously hurt. And, for what it's 
worth, most content companies are not exactly rolling in the cash 
these days, and writers aren't exactly highly paid.

And even if you're repurposing someone else's content into a channel 
that they don't (yet) support, that's illegal. Violating copyright 
isn't based on whether you made money, but on whether you copied the 
content. And, if you only want to think about the money, consider
that 
the source site might be about to launch (for example) an AvantGo 
site.

So I'd suggest that we're all much, much better off if we restrict 
ourselves to syndication of content that people want redistributed,
in 
the way that they want it distributed. It's only decent to ask, and 
not to attack the author's livelihood.

--- In syndication@egroups.com, Rael Dornfest <rael@o...> wrote:
> While there doesn't seem to be any official word on whether or not 
Yahoo!
> approves, some folks do avail themselves of Yahoo! Finance's stock 
quote
> info.  Either Y! doesn't know -- extremely unlikely -- or doesn't 
really
> mind.  Whether or not this applies to what you're trying to 
accomplish and
> syndication in general, I'm not sure.
> 
> If you've not already done so, check out the following (easily 
port-able)
> Perl modules:
> 
> Finance::YahooQuote
> 
http://search.cpan.org/doc/DJPADZ/Finance-YahooQuote-0.17/YahooQuote.p
m
> 
> Finance::YahooChart
> 
http://search.cpan.org/doc/DJPADZ/Finance-YahooChart-0.01/YahooChart.p
m
> 
> On Thu, 1 Jun 2000 burton@r... wrote:
> 
> > Just doing some basic research but hitting dead ends :(
> > 
> > Anyone know the status on syndicated stock quotes?  I want to
have 
stock
> > quote support within Jetspeed (java.apache.org/jetspeed) and I 
need to
> > have an Open provider mechanism.
> > 
> > The thing is that this info should be public.  It should belong
to 
the
> > community.
> 
> Rael