Originally Posted by
Xyzzy
Paying someone to find this data and make it available to you is absolutely causing it to be publicly unavailable. And why do you think th
se sources are drying up? Could it be because someone is (despite protestations to the contrary) selling access to a thousand or two people -- at a rather hefty profit? Based on past experience I think that is an entirely reasonable conclusion to draw. As pointed out above, those whose data is being misused have to pay for its misuse. The fact that they are unhappy about what is going on is certainly understandable.
As far as continuing to pay, I'd be careful because the whack-a-mole for data business model is conducive to neither customer service nor the longevity of a business. There is
zero guarantee that the data you pay KVS for today will be available tomorrow. When you go back to KVS to complain you'll be told that all you did was pay to use a 'browser' and that he'll try to find a substitute. In the mean time, he has your money. That is what quite a few people have discovered of late.
In the past, the data was always available to me. For instance, I could have gone to FlightStats' webpage and used the availability search and hovered over each result to see a little popup with the availability details. And it was a tremendous pain. KVS was worth the $5-6/month to take FlightStats' useless format and put it into something I could use. If the data was actually useful to other people outside of KVS's format, people would have visited that site directly and KVS wouldn't exist. So I have trouble believing that KVS is the reason methods are going out of service. (Except in cases where access to the data is unauthorized, of course.) These sites have done it themselves with poor design or execution.