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Canadian Court Finds Website Scraping Infringes Copyright
First time accepted submitter wrecked writes "A trial judgment from British Columbia, Canada, found that Zoocasa, a real estate search site operated by Rogers Communications, breached copyright by scraping real estate listings and photos from Century 21 Canada. The decision thoroughly reviews the issues of website scraping, Terms of Use, 'Shrink Wrap' and 'Click Wrap' Agreements, robots.txt files, and copyright implications of hyperlinking. For American readers used to multi-million dollar damages, the court here awarded $1,000 (one thousand dollars) for breach of the Century 21 website's Terms of Use, and statutory copyright damages totalling $32,000 ($250 per infringing real estate photo). More analysis at Michael Geist's blog, and the Globe & Mail."
those crappy robot sites that like to take my comments on other web sites and message boards and repost them willie-nilly all over the place in hopes of attracting ad revenue- are those affected by this ruling?
Not like I'm going to file in a Canadian court, but I do find it annoying to have comments showing up all over Google on garbage sites that only exist for a short time and that I've never heard of.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
And hoping that results like this come to America. Web scrapers are ruining the quality of their search engine results.
This is relevant to mint.com and others in the financial space that depend on screen scraping as a key part of their solution.
I wonder what they were smoking, thinking that was legal to do in the first place?
I know if I was a R.E. agent & somebody scraped all the pictures and other work I had gone to in an attempt to sell a property that I was asked and contracted to sell, I would be yelling copyright violations in court. And if the property was sold, I would normally have a contract that said I got my commission if it was sold within the duration of my contact.
They walk among us, and breed too!
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Cheers, Gene.
They're a real estate broker. They make money when the property is sold; displaying ads is only a means to selling the property. Why do they object when people are copying and re-publishing their ads?
DUH!
The US has four per cent of the world's population and eighty per cent of the world's lawyers. Needless to say, they're all pushing up the size of pay outs. Canada, you keep on with those damage limits. The legal profession in the US has become a guild taxing the general population for no valid reason.
IANAL, but in the United States these real estate ads would not be copyrightable because they amount to a collection of facts.
How is this different than Google News? When sites bitch about Google News, I believe Slashdotter's call them greedy and spout "fair use"...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Century 21? What is Gerry Anderson doing selling properties in Australia?
Why not treat them like and end user and shut off internet access for the "user".
I would like to see "Rogers Communications", the runner of the site lose access to the internet.
Some how I don't think the court would do that to one of the top ISP's in Canada.
Yet we are likely to see the courts cut off internet access for small end users. Why are the laws not equal? Corporation got people status, but it seems corporations are way above people status when it comes to some laws. That is not fair. And if it would be unfair to cut off access for a corporation then it should be unfair to cut off access for a person.
I guess with this precedent, Google has to close its service on Canada.
Not only linking, scraping, page previews, google images... just imagine the damages!
I agree with this sentiment. A weeks internet black hole for Rogers Comm. would send a message their greedy board members will never forget.
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Cheers, Gene
Not really, only the subscribers to Rogers would suffer, as they'd use it as a excuse to charge a "Government blocking fee" and increase their profits for that month.
Century 21 usually has exclusive listing contracts, which means that no one else can sell the house for commission without getting sued out of their commission. I don't see the profit for the scraping company.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
and often 10+ seconds to get the damned preview back from /.
The ten-second delay is Slashdot port-scanning your IP address for common open proxies and waiting for connections to time out. You get it on a given IP only once every 24 hours. I've been told that if you set your firewall to refuse the connections instead of letting them timing out, the scan will run faster.
Wow, I bet you graduated from high school in Texas, with the new curriculum, with flying colors.
Seems WAY more reasonable than US copyright court.
Last time I was looking for a place to rent, I felt tempted to do something like this. There are several rental websites out there, and you are lucky if their listing overlap... Comparing locations, prices, what was being offered, etc, was a pain. Some sites would at least let you right-click and open in a new tab, but others wouldn't. The maps, sometimes they were google's, sometimes they were bing, and they would never let you overlay the public transit lines on top... And instead of letting you chose a location and radius on the map, some would ask you for the postal code!
So, I toyed with the idea of scraping those sites and build my own database, and build a website from it for others like me (probably sticking some google ads to try to pay for the hosting). I guess it is a good thing I didn't. And it is a shame to know that I can't (and no one else can either). I don't like Rogers and part of me is smiling about this ruling... but if this means that there will be no "google news"-like service for rent hunting, this is another case of copyright preventing useful services from coming to life.
" the court here awarded $1,000 (one thousand dollars) for breach of the Century 21 website's Terms of Use"
We need an "Internet Terms of Use". "Anything on the internet that was meant to be accessible by the public is automatically public domain.
Dutch real-estate sites often copy their own content, and this goes in a circle.
I've moved into my rental apartment months ago, but on many sites it's still listed as being "IMMEDIATELY AVAILABLE".
I still get the odd person ringing my doorbell and asking if he could have a look at the apartment.
Your post shows just how badly misunderstood copyright law is nowadays. The mere fact that someone puts in a lot of effort to make a web page does not in and of itself mean that that web page is protected by copyright. Many things which require hard work do not qualify for protection under copyright law. Two examples which immediately come to mind are facts (like telephone book listings) or creative works which are considered utilitarian (like clothing/fashion designs, or individual cookbook recipes).
I haven't reviewed the facts of this case, so I don't know whether I would believe copyright was infringed (and what I believe makes no difference, what the court believed is what determines that). And I might well believe copyright wasn't infringed but the copying was immoral (rather than illegal). But I do know that the underlying message of your post: "if my work was copied I would be pissed off so it must be illegal", is just adding to the general confusion over an already complex and contorted branch of the law.
And would not those subscribers/customers who are doing legit business over the web, and who might suffer many thousands in damages from the disconnect, have standing to sue Rogers for their loss of connectivity when it is not their fault, but Rogers actions that got them disconnected?
:)
It seems to me that that the sauce used for the goose should work equally well for the gander.
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Cheers, Gene.
...and this is greatly upsets me. Started it because It was too tiresome to check prices\search for items manually. VapeGrabber ( http://vapegrabber.com ) is based entirely on scraping at this point of time and I'm wondering if something like this could happen to me.
relevant robots.txt paragraph from the decision:
[244] Century 21’s Website has a robot.txt file and uses it to indicate to specific search engines that Century 21 does not want them to index the Century 21 Website. However, Century 21, through its website operator, has not been able to use its robot.txt file to block Zoocasa because it does not know the name of Zoocasa’s robot or spider. That information is required before a site can be blocked. Zoocasa has refused to provide the name of its robot. On this application Zoocasa indicated for the first time that it does not currently have a “branded” Internet robot. Zoocasa has not explained why it does not given how widespread the standard is in the industry.
If anyone was copying your website 1:1, that is assuming you are competent enough to have one, and just replaced your name with his, you would be up screaming "he stole my website".
Copying a little from many makes a doctoral thesis or a fiction book, copying from one without attribution, is plagiarism.
Also, the robots.txt is an established means to indicate that you do not want your content to be copied completely.
Weakening the status of the robots.txt is stupid, exactly because it allows publishers who are too stupid to set up a robots.txt, to claim that someone violated their "Terms of use". If you took the time to scan the court decision, you would find that the defendant willingly violated the standards surrounding the robots.txt file, in particular, it failed to provide a robot name.
Hey don't blame me, IANAB