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.

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 my copyright.

I can't see how the Supreme Court could have ruled any other way.

  "We've tried scraping ourselves in the past (yes, it's perfectly legal),"

A compilation is protected only as a completed work. You can't, for example, photocopy the yellow pages and resell it. But you could copy each and every phone number from the yellow pages and use those numbers in your competing directory.

One additional point that the book makes is that one should keep in mind is your robot showing up in the logs of places you search. You don't want to overload sites, or get on the wrong section of the site admin's radar.

So, facts are not copyrighted, but the way facts are presented are copyrighted.

I still find it hard to believe that what this person had been doing is legal. What is the difference between the scraping he does and copying the phone directory and selling it on. In fact that is not a fair comparision since the wikepidia article suggests that the fone directory was legaly obliged to list these businesses while an individual or google and yahoo are not legaly obliged to enter every business in their directory. In this regard then the choice of information that these directories have made makes their directories copyrighted perhaps.

Local search is not like general text search, where one expects that many of the results returned are not relevant, are wrong, are spam, etc. and can be ignored. Having the incorrect address or phone number for a business on a local search site is a major irritant to the user, and will quickly erode one's user base.

I don't trust Google at all for local information. I use social networks and ask my local friends rather than Google when I'm looking for a restaurant or other business in my town.