[willrobinson]

If data is deliberately made available to the public, then it's public data. Even if's made available for free, that won't stop some on the web from trying to repackage it and derive commercial benefit from it. We've seen this many times. These folks have been very lucky that the validity of their assumptions has not been thoroughly tested in court. Somehow they become convinced they own the data. In reality they are merely the distributor.

Even if CL wins, e.g., they are granted an injunction to stop another site from scraping, scrapers can just get the same data from search engine caches. It's hard to argue trespass to chattels when the alleged trespasser never touches your servers. Moreover, search engines are themselves scrapers so clearly scraping is not per se a damaging activity in CL's view, only when it suits CL to view it that way. Arguing that robots.txt is a "license" is a stretch. It's designed to be read by a machine not a human.

And what if CL loses? What are the stakes then? Well, I'll let you answer that one. What exactly does 3taps have to lose?

CL claims they own the copyrights to facts and descriptions uploaded by CL users. Are users aware of this? Is it reasonable?

3taps' Answer should be a fun read.