I notice all sorts of different vendors, including the defunct opentick, selling or even giving the data away for free. I was wondering what the copyright law is with regards to historical tick data .. does anyone know? If the data is copyrightable, it seems to me that the original exchanges would own the copyright and these middle men are breaking the law, at least those giving the data away for free.
Exactly how could a graph be plotted without historical data? The exchange allows for broadcast of time delayed data. The real time data feeds is what they charge $ for. You can go to CME's web site daily and download tick data for free.
I stand corrected. CME does charge for Historic Data. http://www.cmegroup.com/market-data/datamine-historical-data/datamine.html
If you want to redistribute historic cme data, you need to become a licensed distributor, like everyone else: http://www.cmegroup.com/market-data/licensed-quote-vendors/index.html