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by iolothebard 3736 days ago
Yet companies like LexisNexis get most their data they resell this way.
1 comments

Are they scraping copyrighted data? Or public records? Big difference.
No one in the US can hold copyrights to the pure 'facts', especially if one demonstrates they invested enough energy to 'creatively reinterpret' it. Scraping hasn't quite seen a Supreme Court ruling yet (@grellas correct me, please), but I'm sure one could make a reasonable argument that the energy invested in re-collating the data is sufficient enough to pass any barrier. See Feist Publications, Inc., v. Rural Telephone Service Co, 1991. and O'Connors opinion.
Facts aren't copyrightable.

They scrape everything in the world they can get their hands on.