[horde] Important Information Regarding Your weather.com XML Data Feed (fwd)

[Andrew Morgan]

I received this message from Weather.com about a week ago.

They have some particularly onerous requirements, such as displaying their 
5 included advertising links.  As far as I can tell, I'm not violating 
their terms of service except for the 5 links requirement, but they still 
have disabled my Weather.com access today.

I guess I'll contact them to ask specifically why they disabled us.

 	Andy

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 30 Apr 2008 16:03:54 -0500
From: The Weather Channel <privacy2 at twcweather.com>
To: morgan at orst.edu
Subject: Important Information Regarding Your weather.com XML Data Feed

Dear morgan at orst.edu:

We are contacting you because you are a registrant
for the weather.com XML Data Feed (the ?Service?).
We are providing you with IMPORTANT INFORMATION REGARDING
THE CONTINUATION OF YOUR ACCESS TO THE SERVICE. Your
registered application may or may not currently be
in compliance with the terms of our agreement
(please refer to the developer SDK containing the
  license agreement ? see link below). We are in
the process of updating the Service to programmatically
validate certain licensing conditions. Beginning
May 6, 2008, if your application is not in
compliance with these terms, the Service will no
longer return data to your application.

The complete terms and conditions surrounding the use
of the Service can be found in the developer SDK
along with graphical icons that are necessary to
represent the sky conditions associated with our
current conditions and forecast data, and our logo.
This SDK can be accessed by clicking on the link below.

http://twcweather.com/twc40/c2.php?TWC/7780857/2559/T/N/V/http://download.weather.com/web/xoap/sdk.zip

You may update your user profile or change your product
selections at any time by logging in to the weather.com
registration system with the following information:

Sign-In Page: http://twcweather.com/twc40/c2.php?TWC/7780857/2561/T/N/V/https://registration.weather.com/ursa/xmloap/step2
E-mail address: morgan at orst.edu

The Service includes:

     * city search capability for all locations covered by http://twcweather.com/twc40/c2.php?TWC/7780857/2562/T/N/V/www.weather.com;
     * location specific information necessary for data
presentation;
     * current condition information (Observations) for
the selected location; and
     * up to five (5) days of forecast information
(the current day?s forecast plus four additional
days of forecast information in consecutive order
beginning with tomorrow?s forecast) for the selected
location in ten (10), 12-hour day-parts.

VERY IMPORTANT

YOU MAY NOT USE THE SERVICE TO CREATE WEATHER AND
WEATHER-RELATED PRODUCTS TO BE DISPLAYED ON HANDHELD
OR OTHER WIRELESS DEVICES.

YOU MAY NOT USE THE SERVICE IN CONNECTION WITH AMONG
OTHER THINGS, ANY BROADCAST TELEVISION, INTERACTIVE
TELEVISION, CABLE TELEVISION, TELEPHONE OR DSL SERVICES,
DIGITAL CABLE SERVICES, HEAD-END-IN-THE-SKY SATELLITE
SYSTEMS, RADIO, PRINT PUBLICATIONS, DIGITAL BROADCAST
SATELLITES, TELEMATICS, TELETEXT, VIDEO-ON-DEMAND, KIOSK
DISPLAY, OR OTHER PUBLIC OR PRIVATE INFORMATION DISPLAY
UNIT, WIRE-LINE TELEPHONE, OR AS ALL OR PART OF ANY
STREAMING VIDEO OR AUDIO CONTENT OR FOR DELIVERY BY
ANY MEANS OTHER THAN STATIC DISPLAY ON A TRADITIONAL
WEB PAGE ON YOUR WEBSITE OR DESKTOP APPLICATION.

YOU MAY NOT USE ANY LATITUDE OR LONGITUDE DATA
ASSOCIATED WITH A LocID OR ZIP CODE EVEN IF SUCH
INFORMATION IS RETURNED AS PART OF AN XML DOCUMENT
FROM THE XML FEED.

USE OF THE SERVICE IN VIOLATION OF THE TERMS OF YOUR
AGREEMENT WITH TWCi MAY RESULT IN YOUR IMMEDIATE
TERMINATION AND PAYMENT OF MONETARY DAMAGES TO TWCi.

To comply with the terms of the Agreement, Your
Website or Desktop Application must, among other
things:

     * display weather data for no more than three
(3) locations at a time;
     * adhere to the data request rules, usage rules,
and refresh rates outlined in Exhibit B of the Agreement;
     * clearly separate TWCi data from other data
within a single visual element;
     * identify that the weather data comes from TWCi
by incorporating The Weather Channel logo containing
an embedded link to the http://twcweather.com/twc40/c2.php?TWC/7780857/2562/T/N/V/www.weather.com home page
(one of 5 Required Links);
     * provide four (4) promotional links, selected
by TWCi and provided through the Service on each data
call, back to http://twcweather.com/twc40/c2.php?TWC/7780857/2562/T/N/V/www.weather.com for additional weather
information in close proximity to the TWCi Content
as set forth in Exhibit B of the Agreement; and
     * be free of charge to your end-users.

If you cannot meet these requirements but would still
like to use our weather data, please contact our
business development department at 770-226-0000.

Thank you for your continued support!

Your friends at The Weather Channel Interactive, Inc.
(a/k/a weather.com)

Check out other tools by The Weather Channel at http://twcweather.com/twc40/c2.php?TWC/7780857/2560/T/N/V/http://www.weather.com/services.