| I'll concede there's probably a way to extract non-copyrightable information from websites like Craigslist, though you should as a practical matter expect to fight an expensive court battle to determine that. If somebody set up a Craigslist mirror[1], and people scraped that mirror instead, I wouldn't see any problem with that. But I don't think Craigslist itself should be obligated to serve you their data, the same way a bookstore that tells you to never come back should be allowed to call the police for trespassing if you try to buy a book from them again. I would still maintain that they should be able to tell you to stop visiting their website. They do have terms on their site saying that you agree not to scrape their website by accessing it. I don't know how enforceable those are since they're buried at the bottom, but if Craigslist changed their website to more easily track users(with persistent accounts) and made the terms opt-in, then I'd say they don't even need to send you a letter for you to be in violation. The phone book doesn't get to use this because they flung it on my porch; if you had to visit them and sign an NDA before they gave you a copy, I bet that case would've turned out differently. If they printed an implicit NDA on the first page and threw that on your porch, it's less clear but my guess is it wouldn't fly. Additionally, if you lived right next door to Craigslist, and your requests never crossed state lines, I would tend to think that the federal government doesn't have the authority to regulate your request in the first place, and that it'd be up to the state. [1] These archive the front page, but not the results. There's a robots.txt preventing that. If someone else ignored that request and mirrored everything, they would be doing something wrong but the scrapers of the mirror wouldn't be. https://web.archive.org/web/20160503013529/http://portland.c... http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:craigsl... |