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> factual information isn't copyrightable Tell that to Aaron Swartz. Sure, if you think of factual information as an abstract concept. But as soon as you put

> factual information isn't copyrightable Tell that to Aaron Swartz. Sure, if you think of factual information as an abstract concept. But as soon as you put that abstract concept into a concrete representation, that representation is absolutely copyrightable. And when you scrape data you're not scraping abstract information, you're scraping the representation of that information. Try publishing PDFs of college textbooks online and see how well your "I'm just publishing factual information" argument works. I'm not saying I agree with the law on this, and I'm also not saying that the way the law was intended should apply to the situation of scraping.

yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
> Tell that to Aaron Swartz. He wasn't downloading (purely) factual information, as I understood it. > college textbooks Not even remotely raw factual information. Heck, a table of numbers with a descriptive label probably is copyrightable, but you can scrape the table itself, yes? I think the issue here is that I assumed a very narrow idea of what people would scrape; it hadn't crossed my mind to download prose or such, which I think is why we're arriving at different conclusions.