Websites Complaining About Screen-Scraping

wilko11 writes "There have been two cases recently where websites have requested the removal of modules from CPAN. These modules could be used to access the websites (EuroTV and Streetmap) from a PERL program. The question being asked on the mailinglists (threads about EuroTV and about Streetmap) is 'can companies dictate what software you can use to access web content from their server?'"

Comments

Can information be protected by copyright?

[Lumpish Scholar]

Everyone's assuming the appropriate rules here are from copyright law, which allow you to protect the expression of an idea but not the idea itself. That's probably right. It's not the way some big organizations want to play.

In the United States, most major sports leagues (NFL, NBA, NHL, MLB, etc.) believe that they own the rights to real time scores, and can permit or restrict any desired use. I ran into this at a previous job: we could "broadcast" football, basketball, and hockey scores at the end of every "period," and baseball scores at the end of every half inning, but we couldn't send updated broadcasts for every new score. That information needed (so said the leagues) to be licensed, and most of it had been exclusively licensed for the medium (Internet) we were interested in.

Do they have a legal leg to stand on? No. (IANAL.) Are they leaning on a great, big, huge stick with nails driven through it? Apparently.

ebay has already done this

[troydsmith]

About 2 years ago ebay did exactly this. Their case went to court and they won.

Here is some more info

Derivative work

[yerricde]

There's no law stating that we have to look at ads.

What about 17 USC 106, which states that barring fair use, etc., the copyright owner has the right to prevent others from creating derivative works of a web page?

Re:Derivative work

[Natalie's Hot Grits]

Yes, barring fair use, which explicitly allows you to do this unless you re-distribute the work. Which you aren't.

Short answer is that you can modify any work under fair use for your OWN PERSONAL USE and not for someone else. If your web browser cuts out ads, then that is legal, and no US Code that is currently existance disallows these modifications.

Aside from this point, there is still the legal rammifications that there is no US Law which states it is illegal to build, distribute, or use tools that can modify copyrighted works (unless the work is encrypted and covered under the DMCA)

If an ISP started doing this at his firewall, and then re-distributing the web site to your computer after you request it, then this might be illegal. They might be able to argue that one party is getting the work, modifying it, and redistributing it, which is certaintly not covered under the Fair Use Doctrine.

OTOH, if the ISP has a fair use reason to do this (such as reformatting the text to work on a text only terminal), then this may also be legal.

What it all boils down to is that the spirit of copyright laws are restricting COPYING and REDISTRIBUTING, not how a person uses those works. This has been true untill 1998 when the DMCA was enacted, and even now is still true for all copyrighted works that are not covered under the DMCA's encryption clauses. To this day, I have yet to find a website that is encrypted for purposes of the DMCA protection. Untill this changes, they won't have any legal legs to stand on.