Fair Use?
 

All I need to use from a Website (softpedia.com) is the version number (and maybe the download link) for several programs. First of all, I believe that's not original content by the website and second of all their Terms of Use don't say anything regarding that except that they own (copyright) everything. I'm planning to even add a "Powered by softpedia.com" in the statusbar or in a corner of my program. I believe it's fair use because I'm not stating I'm the creator/owner of the information I use and I also link to the website in my program. What are your opinions?

PS: By the way writing my 2nd somewhat "functional" program in Perl :)

Ask them. Consult an attorney.

For the most part Softpedia is just a catalogue, follows the links back to the authors homepage and ask them directly. Forget about the middleman.

Well I am downloading information from their site, not the authors. It's just a version number only.. I mean is it seriously illegal to use that information. I already contacted the websites, but right now I'm studying whether it would legal without their consent anyway.. cause a version number is a fact, they can't own copyright to it. Right?

PS: I don't have money to use a lawyer on this kind of thing. I'm only 16.

^^ What exactly does your program do, why do you want to download the version numbers? Or don't you want to say?

It tracks for software updates. Scans registry, detects installed programs, once a day or 12 hrs or so downloads htmls for those programs and looks at the version numbers. That's it. And it's non-commercial opensource, I could just post the code to my program online without the URLs and tell people what to put there. It's not like I'm violating the copyright.. that would be if I just use their whole site (or some created material) and say I made it. BUT, I am going to make it clear that softpedia.com was used for information.

Sounds good.... and like fair use of their site (but I'm not a lawyer).

Yeah I'm going to wait a little while for more opinions from people and for that email from softpedia.

I wouldn't worry about Softpedia, they never ask permission from anyone else in the first place. They have some of my Software up here and I know a number of other authors in the same boat.

In my case it doesn't bother me but I've heard one author complain that they direct link to the downloads and not the pages that host them, so your end-users might never even see your own little corner of the web.

Okay and anyway there's nothing about that in their terms of use right? Cause versiontracker specifically states no "data mining".. but that's cause VersionTracker has their own program Version Tracker lol I'm just making an open source version of that so people don't have to pay money anymore :)