Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
CHAPTER 6
Data Sources: Making Homes Smart
Although being able to e-mail your light switch is very interesting and infinitely cooler than programming yet
another version of “Hello, World,” it never feels like an
automatic
house. After all, you as a human are controlling it.
By providing your house with information about the real world, it is then able to make decisions for itself. This is the
distinction between an automated home and a smart home.
Why Data Is Important
For years, the mantra “Content is king” has been repeated in every field of technology. Although most of the data in
your home automation environment so far has been generated from your own private living patterns, there is still a
small (but significant) amount of data that you haven't generated, such as TV schedules. I'll now cover this data to
see what's available and how you can (legally) make use of it.
Legalities
All data is copyrighted. Whether it is a table of rainfall over the past 20 years or the listing for tonight's TV schedule,
any information that has been compiled by a human is afforded a copyright. The exception is when data has been
generated by a computer program, in which case the source data is copyrighted by the individual who created it,
and the copyright to the compiled version is held by the person who facilitated the computer to generate it, usually
the person who paid for the machine. Unfortunately, all useful data falls into the first category. Even when the data
is made publicly available, such as on a web site, or when it appears to be self-evident (such as the top ten music
singles), the data still has a copyright attached to it, which requires you to have permission to use it.
1
Depending on
jurisdiction, copyright will traditionally lapse 50 or 75 years after the death of the last surviving author. However, with
the introduction of new laws, such as the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, even these lengthy periods may
be extended. In this field, the data becomes useless before it becomes available, which is unfortunate.
Fortunately, there are provisions for private use and study in most countries that allow you to process this data for
your own personal use. Unfortunately, this does not include redistributing the data to others or manipulating the data
into another format. This, from a purely technical and legal point of view, means that you can't do the following:
u
Provide the data to others in your household. They have to download it themselves. This
includes reproducing the information on a home page or distributing a TV or radio signal to
other machines.
u
Improve the format of the data and provide it to others who are technically unable to do the same.
This includes parsing the data from one web site to show it in a more compact format at home.
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