I don't see how that's true at all. Running a meatspace telephone book through a sheet-fed scanner and OCR isn't wildly different from scraping a website.

It's different because you don't contact another party's server to do it. The CFAA makes it illegal to "exceed authorized access" to networked computers. "Authorized access" is whatever the server's owner says it is. That's why the copyright status of factual accumulations isn't a protection for internet scraping.

If Feist v. Rural occurred now and Rural, like most companies, kept their information in a database online, Feist would lose not for copyright infringement, but for exceeding authorized access to Rural's server.

You've made a large number of authoritative-sounding comments on this story... and this one, like many of the others, is a guess.

To the extent that I can't tell what would actually happen in an alternate future where Feist v. Rural occurred in the digital realm, sure. To the extent that the CFAA allows companies to make that type of determination today in the actual timeline, no, it's not a guess (and I have the wrecked business to prove it).