A recent US 11th Circuit Court decision, Compulife Software, Inc. v. Newman dealt with a case of web scraping which can be contrasted against the SG High Court decision in PropertyGuru Pte Ltd v. 99 Pte Ltd, highlighting the differing legislative and judicial approaches to intellectual property protection against web scraping.
In Compulife Software, Inc. v. Newman (US), the Court ruled that scraping public data via copying of code by a competitor can constitute both trade secret misappropriation and copyright infringement.
The defendants had scraped millions of insurance quotes from Compulife’s website, which the court deemed a violation due to the proprietary nature of the compiled data.
Technically, the data is public. The Court considered that ordinarily, if the defendant had merely taken individual screenshots of the data, it wouldn’t necessarily be infringing. In this case, however, the defendant copied the order of the HTML code in a way that enabled it to scrape millions of quotes. This amounted to trade secret misappropriation under the federal Defend Trade Secrets Act and Florida’s Uniform Trade Secrets Act.
While the copying was the order of the HTML code and not the code itself, the Court considered that it may be possible for the arrangement / order of the code to be copyright protected. This was remanded to the below court for consideration.
In PropertyGuru Pte Ltd v. 99 Pte Ltd, the Singapore High Court dismissed PropertyGuru’s claim of copyright infringement against 99.co. PropertyGuru alleged that 99.co had copied property listings from its website. However, the court found that PropertyGuru did not hold copyright over the photographs uploaded by property agents. There was also an issue of whether the cross-postings on both platforms amounted to a breach of the terms of use of the website. However, this was not properly pleaded so it was not considered by the Court.
The contrasting decisions underscore the importance of businesses having to take technical, practical and also legal means to protect proprietary compilations of data, and the limitations of copyright claims on user-generated content and compilations under Singapore law.
Singapore businesses should ensure robust terms of service governing use of their websites, apps, and other services to prohibit unauthorized scraping, as an additional legal basis for protection and recourse.
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