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Take them to court. I will donate to your legal fund.


On what grounds, exactly? They have every right to deny you access to theirs servers.


They have every right to implement technical barriers to scraping. Whether they can invoke the law to establish a legal barrier to re-publishing their proprietary-but-public facts -- not even the apartment summary text, just extracted metadata -- is not at all clear. When an auction aggregator was sued by eBay for doing something similar, the judgment in eBay's favor rested on the fact that the aggregator was posing a real undue technical burden, not the inherent fact that they were scraping.[1] Since I assume Padmapper does intelligent scraping, they might have a fairly good case.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBay_v._Bidder%27s_Edge


I think you may be confusing two issues.

It's almost certainly true that they could republish the data without violating any law. That has nothing to do with whether they have the right to scrape the data from the website.

IE do not confuse their right to republish the data with the right to get it from a particular source in a particular way.

The line of cases you are citing is also about trespass to chattels, which is a pretty bad claim to make about website scraping (for the reasons the california supreme court set out in Intel vs Hamidi). It was mainly used back in the days when courts barely knew what websites were. Trespass to chattels may still get used when you can show actual harm caused by the scraping, but most claims nowadays would be around terms of use violations, which are a much more grey area (some courts have gone for it, some not).




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