Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: Getting Stock XML - Legal?

Author:Edd Dumbill
Posted:7/26/1999; 11:24:26 AM
Topic:Finding/getting XML content
Msg #:8763 (In response to 8753)
Prev/Next:8762 / 8764

I'm going to explore this, try to buy a license to the feeds that the HTML versions of the quote services use, and see what walls I hit, if any.

As Eric indicated, I expect you'd hit quite a few. I used to work for a news agency, which sells content from news thru sports scores to financial information (http://www.pa.press.net/), and tying down redistribution rights was pretty fundamental to selling the data.

I believe XML is popular already in syndication of content - Big Charts for instance have an XML-based API into their stock chart rendering system. However everything's pretty tied up in contractual limitations.

My belief is that the commercial models that work for XML are pretty much those we have at the moment for selling any database: and by and large these involve payment for content (even though what you do with the content may fund the payment).

The Internet screws with publishing models, granted, but the markets for the underlying content still exist, and in fact have expanded due to the Internet. At the rawest level, authors are still required (and paid) to write, even though their content may be given away for free.

With protocols such as XML-RPC, XML does offer up the more interesting possibility of payment for processing -- micropayments for using some facility. I guess Northern Light might be a good candidate for this, at a basic level.




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