Canadian Court Finds Website Scraping Infringes Copyright 147
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."
Curious question, (Score:5, Interesting)
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.