This is still an emerging area of law. I'm not familiar with Feist v. Rural, but what you are discussing is very similar to Ticketmaster vs. Tickets.com, in the

This is still an emerging area of law. I'm not familiar with Feist v. Rural, but what you are discussing is very similar to Ticketmaster vs. Tickets.com, in the case of the latter scraping the former's site for data. There appears to have been some previous discussion on HN about this here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=411555 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=411555 The unfortunate part of all of this is that the court system in general does not have its act together with regards to Internet Law. This is largely a function of Congress completely failing to pass any laws related to Internet/software property rights, especially in the area of patents. Which is why the entire patent system is a disaster now with regards to software IP. There are similar problems in the area of data scraping and intellectual property copying online. Basically for every case you can find where the court ruled one way, you can generally find a counter example where a different court ruled in a contradictory manner.