Legality of IFRAME Inclusion of 3rd Party Website Content

I have a website in which i'd like to use an iframe to embed a web page from another website. The page in question is a calculator. The page itself has a copyright notice. Is this illegal for me to do this?

Depends on the site. You would need to read through the site in question's TOS to see what limitations there are in regards to using their site (or page from their site). There are sites that allow you to use pages from their sites, other sites don't... Your best bet would be to read through their TOS, and if that fails, contact them directly.

Please take a moment to look at these two pages -

Page One Example

and this page

Page Two Example

You are looking at an online calculator developed by a non-profit named ATRA, the Automatic Transmission Rebuilders Association.

I used to work with this organization but ventured out on my own developing websites for its members. Recently several of my clients asked to have this calculator on their websites. Being the clever programmer I am I used teh IFRAME tag in example two. I contacted ATRA and asked permission to incorporate this feature on my clients (their members) websites and was told no as they would have no way of monitoring its usage. I was also told they place this on other members' websites who do not have my website but rather pay for one of the organization's websites.

The question I have is as presented in my example, whereas I give full credit to ATRA and do not hide or remove any copyright material, can I legally do this? Please note that this tool is available from the organizations main and quite public website. Thanks.

(threads merged)

Please see this answer to your question.

You asked them, they said no, and you still want to pursue the issue?

Write your own calculator, or negotiate a fee structure that's acceptable to both parties.

Insofar as writing my own calculator where does the issue of copyright come in? Can I basically take the same form, change some of the accompanying text, rescript it, and have no worries of any copyright infringement? Is it the idea that is copyrighted or the code? If the latter then simply recoding it to do the same thing should not be an issue right?

You may wish to read through the Copyright Office FAQs. You can pretty much copy the idea and not violate copyright. However, ideas are not protected by copyright. They are instead protected by patent. So, if the process of deriving the calculation is patented, then actually you have more to worry about than copyright protection as the damages for trademark infringement are generally higher. I don't know about the mathematics involved in this calculation, so I can't really speculate about that. You can do a patent search, but that can be tedious and difficult. If this is pretty much a standard industry calculation or known formula though you would be ok, just as anyone can put up a mortgage amortization calculator, tax rate calculator, or similar.

If the existing calculator works well, I'd be trying to negotiate an agreement that allows it's use in another site rather than creating a new app.