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Comment by z3c0 | Hacker News Reader

I had to refresh before posting, because I wanted to see if someone else beat me to being that HN commenter but...

From the Terms of Service (emphasis mine):

6. Restrictions on Use

You agree not to:

    Use the Service for any unlawful purpose.

    Attempt to reverse-engineer, modify, or *create derivative works of the Service.*

    Share, resell, or distribute downloadable data provided by the Service without explicit written permission.

Do you intend to delineate the data provided by the service from "the Service" itself? It seems most fair that data received via Fair Use remains in that arena, pun fully intended.

That aside, it's an intriguing dataset nonetheless, but I'd prefer to see a sample of the data before signing up.

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Thank you for highlighting this. I've updated the terms to align with the values of this service.

Steamdb.info displays graphs etc. Is that considered a “derivative work”?

I am not sure what is considered derivative work and what isn’t

IANAL but I am someone who deals heavily in 1) scraping and 2) data and the analysis, enrichment & brokerage thereof. As such, I like to consult this for anything regarding US Copyright law: https://www.copyright.gov/circs

Circular 14 addresses derivative works, including those based on data: https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ14.pdf

Steamdb.info is a derivative work, yes. And scraping is usually accepted as Fair Use, so both services are presumably within their rights, but they have no claim to the underlying data, only their process of enrichment. If someone were to build a new service based on the data presented on either site, there's not much they could do to stop them... short of getting them to agree not to do so via their ToS.

OpenAI is a great example of a company who built a derivative work on scraped data available under Fair Use, and then subsequently gated their data via their ToS. With such a popular precedent at play, I'd rather not use any services doing anything similar, especially when steamdb.info doesn't even have a ToS.

Thank you. Does this still hold good if steamdb was making money (ads, for example)?

Also, I am wary of using big companies like OpenAI as precedent. Big companies can do whatever they want and get away with a lot of stuff that individuals and smaller companies can only dream of

Yes, within some limits, but if one were to set up a business like that, it's a very good idea to seek out a consultation from a local copyright lawyer to know exactly what one can and can't get away with. Datasets are addressed as a "collective work", which lumps them in with everything ranging from art books, to hackernews, to scientific journals.

Personally, I wouldn't sell anything I gathered from a publicly available source anyways, mostly out of principle, but doubly so if that source is as well-paid as Valve.

> Personally, I wouldn't sell anything I gathered from a publicly available source anyways, mostly out of principle, but doubly so if that source is as well-paid as Valve.

Market reports are an entire industry, and people pay for them solely to avoid ingesting a tangential domain. It's ok to sell your transformations.

My advice is free, my custom tooling is dirt cheap with public examples, and my finished product costs money every month. It's basically price tiers based on your interest level.

At a glance, it appears the product is the “chat with the data" feature; The CSV is free.

What I don't understand is the difference between 'Download all CSV data' in the free tier and 'Download CSV data' / 'Download raw data' in the paid member tier. It seems that the free CSV data is likely an extract or digest of the raw data offered as a sample.

I might be inclined to seek the raw data, should it be more cost effective than scraping Steam myself.

Being a user, free, paid, or anonymous, can still be under the thumb of their ToS, especially so if they force a dialog in front of you to agree to the ToS while signing up. I'm merely pointing out hurdles to the OP that may obstruct some of the people they are trying to reach.

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