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- Use of meta search engine for data scraping infringes EU database right, decides CJEU
Use of meta search engine for data scraping infringes EU database right, decides CJEU
In a judgment released on 19th December 2013, the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) decided that the scraping of data from a website's database could constitute an infringement of the sui generis right in the database (article 7 of EU Database directive) if it:
- provided the end user with a search form which essentially offered the same range of functionality as the search form on the database site;- ‘translated' queries from end users into the search engine for the database site ‘in real time', so that all the information on that database is searched through; and- presented the results to the end user using the format of its website in the same way as in the targeted database site
The case (C-202/12, Innoweb v. Wegener) involved Innoweb BV's activities through its web search engine carried out on third party websites and in particular on Wegener's website, where a collection of car sales advertisements (‘car ads') was displayed.