jack_deneut

That was the point of the post. Without some manual oversight of every new listing, too many errors will creep in to make the database truly useful.

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.

The only cities we have good data for are Prague, Copenhagen, and lower Manhattan. Try http://www.nelso.com/cz/prague/

The blog post I wrote wasn't primarily about the legality of scraping (and I also didn't expect it to be read by more than a few people). But as that seems to be the topic of the thread, here's my response.

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.