Web Scraping and DMCA

Copyright claims are often brought by data hosts against scrapers. In the United States, copyrighted work is protected by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

Nonetheless, it's widely known that facts alone can't be copyrighted, so DMCA and similar legislation won't protect data hosts against scrapers unless they have full control over the copyright of the stored content. The point is that the transfer of copyright ownership generally requires a written agreement signed by the copyright owner.

While it's true that 'the creative selection, coordination and arrangement of information and materials forming a database or compilation may be protected by copyright' (cendi.gov), this protection doesn't extend to the facts stored in the database. Put simply, copyright is meant to protect originality and creativity, not facts.

Let's take a Google results page as an example. Its design and layout may be regarded as creative work and hence can be copyrighted. At the same time, facts contained in a results page, including headlines and snippets, are not owned by Google; in fact, they are being pulled from other people's websites without transferring copyright ownership.

Given that results on Google SERPs are not protected by copyright, it's only logical that MooseMail doesn't violate DMCA by scraping them.

Although scraping is legal by itself, it's possible for data hosts to mount legal defenses against scrapers, including CFAA and DMCA violation claims.

The outcomes of recent lawsuits filed against scrapers prove that there are a lot of grey areas in current legislation on this matter, and courts may stand in favor of open access to publicly available information (see Sanding v. Sessions ruling).

Even though data hosts may prevail against scrapers in courts, it's often against their interest to sue. For example, if it weren't for crawling public websites and scraping data from them, Google probably wouldn't even exist.

We don't violate CFAA or DMCA when scraping publicly available information from Google SERPs. You can rest assured: using MooseMail services is legal, it's not the violation of the law. By the same token, you can't break Google ToS by simply getting data through our APIs.

This article does not constitute legal advice. You should seek the counsel of an attorney on your specific matter to comply with the laws in your jurisdiction.