23 June 2007

Acquittal for web scraping over top rural website

In short, the Judgment dismisses the claim, on the understanding that TOP RURAL had not accredited the investment necessary to merit the protection of the Law, and that it had not been proved that the competitor had copied substantial parts of the database, since there are elements that allowed to sustain a manual action of the defendant, as well as the possibility of having obtained the data from other sources.

The application of the Law of Unfair Competition is also rejected based on the differences in the way of presenting the information of the pages in conflict, finding difficult the association between the origin of one and the other and the small amount of announcements in which the information provided on both pages was totally coincident. To this it should be added that, if there are communications with each of the advertisers, or at least with most of them, it is not possible to take advantage of the effort of others, given that this cost, in time and money, is assumed by the page that supposedly copy the ads.

You can read the complete Judgment in the Spanish version of the website.