The blog post I wrote wasn't primarily about the legality of scraping (and I also didn't expect it to be read by more than a few people). But as that seems to be the topic of the thread, here's my response.<p>The courts found that it isn't possible to copyright facts, and that's all we were scraping - things like addresses, business name, and phone number. We weren't even scraping things like business category, because something as simple as putting a restaurant in the category "Fine Dining" might be considered a judgment call and therefore value-add by the original site.<p>And think of what would have happened if the court had found otherwise (i.e. had found that lists of facts could be copyrighted). If you opened a store, and I was the first one to put your address and phone number on-line, no one else could ever include your address or phone number on their site. Even if you created a website for your own business after I published your address, you wouldn't be able to include it on your site, because you'd violate <i>my</i> copyright.<p>I can't see how the Supreme Court could have ruled any other way.