If you scrape, and effectively reconstitute a database, then so long as the database originally had a "substantial investment" in it's "obtaining, verifying or presenting the contents" then yup... you have breached the database right, which is a modified form of copyright.
You may access said database (via the web), but as soon as you start reconstituting the database from scraping... you're in breach.
It's a law, it is illegal in the UK, I'm sure most countries have some equivalent law on their books, all of the EU does. The law looks recent, but UK copyright and patent used to cover it, the 1997 date is just a separate statute to clarify the position.
Actually, such database laws are rare. The US and Canada don't have one. See Feist v. Rural Telephone for an example of databases getting scraped & the scraper winning in court.
The World Copyright Treaty of the WIPO, which the US also signed, enforces in Article 5 that every member country has to have a database law of this kind.
________________________
> Article 5: Compilations of Data (Databases)
> Compilations of data or other material, in any form, which by reason of the selection or arrangement of their contents constitute intellectual creations, are protected as such. This protection does not extend to the data or the material itself and is without prejudice to any copyright subsisting in the data or material contained in the compilation.
In fact, this fucking treaty is the only reason so many countries even have that at all – the EU didn’t have any Database Law before it was created, and the US threatened (as always) to boycott any country not signing.
To be clear, this wasn't a scraper in the networked computer sense. It's actually a perfect example of how meatspace safeguards don't translate because law is not equipped to handle the nature of cyberspace.
I don't see how that's true at all. Running a meatspace telephone book through a sheet-fed scanner and OCR isn't wildly different from scraping a website.
It's different because you don't contact another party's server to do it. The CFAA makes it illegal to "exceed authorized access" to networked computers. "Authorized access" is whatever the server's owner says it is. That's why the copyright status of factual accumulations isn't a protection for internet scraping.
If Feist v. Rural occurred now and Rural, like most companies, kept their information in a database online, Feist would lose not for copyright infringement, but for exceeding authorized access to Rural's server.
To the extent that I can't tell what would actually happen in an alternate future where Feist v. Rural occurred in the digital realm, sure. To the extent that the CFAA allows companies to make that type of determination today in the actual timeline, no, it's not a guess (and I have the wrecked business to prove it).
You can't copyright facts in the US. You effectively can in the EU, as the grandparent discussed, as long as you demonstrate that it took significant investment to arrange the compendium of facts from which they were drawn.
You may still record the responses you receive from such a database and use it for your own purposes. The database law only restricts making a duplicate database available to the public.
What happens if you use that data to create entirely new database? Let's say, can I create a database of people who work at Google and like ice cream by scrapping linkedIn and Facebook?
https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/UK_Database_Law#Database_Right
If you scrape, and effectively reconstitute a database, then so long as the database originally had a "substantial investment" in it's "obtaining, verifying or presenting the contents" then yup... you have breached the database right, which is a modified form of copyright.
You may access said database (via the web), but as soon as you start reconstituting the database from scraping... you're in breach.
It's a law, it is illegal in the UK, I'm sure most countries have some equivalent law on their books, all of the EU does. The law looks recent, but UK copyright and patent used to cover it, the 1997 date is just a separate statute to clarify the position.