Not only do competitor's do it, but also university and transportation authority researchers have as well. Usually scraping is covered under tort law as a tres

Not only do competitor's do it, but also university and transportation authority researchers have as well. Usually scraping is covered under tort law as a trespass to chattels. Since services have limited capacity, any scraping that imposes an undue amount of traffic is essentially depriving that entity of using their capacity to serve legitimate customers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trespass_to_chattels https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trespass_to_chattels Insofar as copyright is concerned, you can't really copyright data, but you can copyright a collection of data. See Feist v. Rural. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications,_Inc.,_v._Rural_Telephone_Service_Co https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications,_Inc.,_v._R.... To determine if someone is copying your data wholesale via scraping or some other method, it's not uncommon for a data provider to include false data that isn't real. If they see a competitor publishing that data, they can make the case that the competitor is copying their collection of data, especially if enough pieces of false data show up. In mapping, these are known as trap streets. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street