As the amount (and value) of online data continues to grow exponentially, so does the practice of internet data scraping—that is, the harvesting of data from third-party websites for commercial purposes. Because scraping activity, and the efforts to stop it, have continued apace, it’s necessary to stay refreshed on the topic.

Copyright and the DMCA

Internet data often is protected by copyright, leading website owners to contend that scraping constitutes infringement and/or violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. In recent years, the DMCA—which prohibits circumventing technological measures that effectively control access to a copyrighted work (17 U.S.C. § 1201(a)(1)(A))—has become a more popular enforcement tool; unlike infringement, DMCA plaintiffs need not own or hold an exclusive license to the copyrighted works at issue. To state a DMCA violation, plaintiffs generally must allege that they implemented technological barriers (e.g., password- or CAPTCHA-protections) within their website, but a scraper evaded those barriers by some technological workaround.

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