If the company hosting these stats is charging $25K per licensee, then either they're really good at bluffing or their lawyers have made sure that their data is

If the company hosting these stats is charging $25K per licensee, then either they're really good at bluffing or their lawyers have made sure that their data is protected in spite of Feist. For example, if they use some kind of clickwrap "you must consent to this license before you can see our statistics" page, then the company doing the scraping could be sued for contract violation, even if there's no copyright issue. So the site owner can't hit you for statutory copyright damages and has to settle for actual damages, i.e., the $25K of license fees that you're not paying, plus attorney's fees, plus whatever else their attorney can think to lather on. And your would-be partner hasn't even set up a corporate veil to protect his personal assets from this kind of exposure? That's...insane. And not in a good way.