Internet 'Data Scraping'

The proliferation of Internet access and mobile devices has led to an exponential explosion of content on the Web, creating a vast repository of “publicly available” information. This includes not only news, business and financial information, but also personal data, movie and restaurant reviews, concert ticket sales, flight information, and a virtually endless array of other categories. This same technological explosion, however, has made it far easier for third parties to extract this data for commercial sale and use ' and to do so for free and without authorization. This data extraction, commonly referred to as “scraping,” “crawling,” or “spidering” (collectively “scraping”), creates legal issues and concerns for both sides of this issue ' those who want to scrape, and those who want to protect against scraping of their websites. See, EF Cultural Travel BV v. Zefer, 318 F.3d 58, 60 (1st Cir. 2003) (“A scraper, also called a 'robot' or 'bot,' is nothing more than a computer program that accesses information contained in a succession of webpages stored on the accessed computer”); eBay v. Bidder's Edge, 100 F. Supp. 2d 1058, 1060 (N.D. Cal. 2000).