As a company that does data aggregation and analytics on a grand scale, we felt it was important to bring up the subject of how copyright and contract law impact our work.
One of the best discussions I have been able to find in 2015 on the future of data and data analysis, copyright law, and contractual agreements remains to be David Sorkin, Peter DiCola, and Marcelo Halpern’s debate on the topic at Northwestern Law School. Much has changed since then - especially with how much we’ve learned about companies using open data - but the law and the topics they were discussing 4 years ago are still relevant today. That said, our use and analysis of open data sets are rooted in case law from the 1990s. One particular case, Feist Publications v. Rural Telephone Service, serves as the backbone of how we approach collecting and processing open data. This point of view was supported by outside counsel as well:
The collection of datasets from third-parties and the subsequent alterations make it highly unlikely that Inca risks liability for infringement of the intellectual property rights of others.