Canadian Court Finds Website Scraping Infringes Copyright

Posted by timothy on Sunday October 2, 2011 @03:19AM from the didja-see-the-eula-punk dept.

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."

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Century 21? by M.+Baranczak · 2011-10-02 03:35 · Score: 4, Insightful

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?
1. Re:Century 21? by M.+Baranczak · 2011-10-02 04:04 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  As a company who has ads out, do you want people to look at your ads only or the ads for you and your competitors?
  And now, people visiting this site will only see ads from C-21's competitors. Well done, guys.
  
  Also, with real estate the commissions on a property sold are split between the real estate agent of the buyer and the seller.
  Completely irrelevant. Just because someone publishes an ad doesn't make them an agent.