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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.
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?
*facepalm. 300,000,000/7,000,000,000 = .0428 or about 4.3%. 23% of 7 billion is about 2.2 billion, idiot.
Yes, you are definitely not a lawyer since you, as with most Slashtards, misunderstand what you are talking about. Yes, the facts themselves can not be copyrighted but the expression on those facts can be copyrighted. Which is why I can take the info from the phone book and publish them myself but I can't take someone else's phonebook, copy all the pages and then republish it as my own work because that expression of those facts are copyrighted.
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 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
I think that Google should just blackhole Canada if this ruling stands.
See, back a while ago, the newspapers in Belgium sued Google for copyright infringement, and Google was told by the court to take down the content or face a big fine, per day.
So they did took it down.
Suddenly the Belgian newspapers were screaming bloody murder because they weren't getting hits.
Go ahead, "content creators", kill indexing and searching. Bring it back to the old days of no search engines. I dare you.
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BMO
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 decision was quite specific on this. The issue was not about the facts such as address, number of bedrooms, floor space, etc. It stated quite clearly that those were not copyrightable. The issue was the description of the property which are impressions done on prose and the pictures. Both of these a copyrightable.
I like your sig. ;)
Text, scraped and copied might be gotten away with, but if I took the photo, the copyright is mine and you must negotiate the use of a copy of that photo with me. I have been rather intimately involved with that aspect of photography since the late 40's, and have even won a suit for the theft of my work to the tune of ten grand back in about 1982. That part of copyright law is, at least here in the states, air tight. OTOH, if I post it, I believe that one can link to my picture, but to copy that link and store it on your machine is a clear cut violation.
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Cheers, Gene