FRED's new Terms of Service

UPDATE 20 Feb 2016: shortened the intro. added images and notes at the end.

Here's the copyright notice as copied from FRED's new Terms of Service:

FRED® Graphs ©Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. . All rights reserved. All FRED® Graphs appear courtesy of Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/

I noticed that after the ©Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis there are two periods where I expected one. So I went looking through the HTML. The text of the required statement has an error.

See  how some of the words and letters are purple? Like TD at the top and TABLE at the bottom of the image... Almost all the text within angle braces is purple. That's because the "view-source" interpreter thinks that each text within angle braces is an HTML statement of one sort or another. Well, in the text of the legal statement, the word YEAR is in angle braces. The view-source interpreter thinks the word YEAR is supposed to be an HTML statement because of the angle braces. So the interpreter made it purple. No doubt your typical browser will interpret it the same way.

I think what FRED really wants is that we should enter the current year (like "2016") when we show the credit and legal notice. I pointed this out to them via their "send feedback" tab. If they change the legal notice, you'll know I was right.

Oh! Now I know why the slash i in angle braces in that image is red instead of black with a purple "i". It's because the view-source interpreter expected to find in the HTML a closing YEAR statement (slash YEAR in angle braces) before it found the slash-i statement.

When it found slash-i instead of slash-YEAR, it discovered the error, and it made the slash-i red to indicate the error.

//

Saturday morning first thing, I see they have revised their copyright notice to include the date:

Yeah, that's more like it.

Not sure if it's still the case, but it used to be that to copyright something you had to claim the copyright and you had to put the date on it. Invalid without the date. Without the date, I think, rights are not reserved.

Here's the HTML code again. I highlighted the changed part in blue:

(The slash-i in angle brackets is no longer red.)

My work here is done.