How does copyright law affect web scraping? Are facts such as names, addresses, prices, etc copyrightable? In most cases, no. Copyright law has a strict constitutional requirement for originality. The author of a copyrightable work must have created it. A fact is not created by an author even if they are the first to record it. In that case, they are not the creator of fact, they are merely the discoverer of fact.

I want to extract content from a website for internal analysis purposes. None of the content will be republished. Is there anything the website owner can do to stop me? Yes, but not with copyright law. Basically if a website owner does not want you to access their site, they can ask you to stop. If you do not comply, they can invoke Trespass to Chattel as in the eBay v. Bidder's Edge case of 2000.

Are compilations of facts such as phone directories copyrightable? Yes, but very thinly. Facts themselves are not copyrightable, and compilations can only be copyrighted for the originality of their selection and arrangement. That said, of course, if the compilation has elements in it (such as news articles) that are not facts and are indeed copyrightable themselves then those elements must be left out. The court specifically denies "sweat of brow" arguments relating to the efforts of the compiler in the 1976 Copyright act. For a complete discussion of this topic see Feist Publications v. Rural Telephone Service.

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