Here is an attempted translation from legalese.
Company B scraped listings off of Company A's site, and published their own site based off of that data. Then A sued on three grounds:
1. Company B's notices falsely claimed copyright to the listings.
2. Company B ignored company A's copyright notice.
3. Violation of the Lanham Act, which prevents people claiming something is from somewhere other than where it is when they sell it. (This is the interesting one.)
The court ruled as follows.
General copyright notices at the bottom of a web page claim copyright over the site as a whole and not to all of the data that may appear in the site. Therefore 1 fails because company B's notice is not claiming copyright. And 2 fails because A's notice was not specific enough to claim copyright.
As for 3, the fact that there is no physical product means that the precedent the Supreme Court set in the Darstar case applies - the Lanham act only applies to physical products.
I'm sure that I didn't get it quite right, but that version may be more readable than the original article.
Company B scraped listings off of Company A's site, and published their own site based off of that data. Then A sued on three grounds:
1. Company B's notices falsely claimed copyright to the listings.
2. Company B ignored company A's copyright notice.
3. Violation of the Lanham Act, which prevents people claiming something is from somewhere other than where it is when they sell it. (This is the interesting one.)
The court ruled as follows.
General copyright notices at the bottom of a web page claim copyright over the site as a whole and not to all of the data that may appear in the site. Therefore 1 fails because company B's notice is not claiming copyright. And 2 fails because A's notice was not specific enough to claim copyright.
As for 3, the fact that there is no physical product means that the precedent the Supreme Court set in the Darstar case applies - the Lanham act only applies to physical products.
I'm sure that I didn't get it quite right, but that version may be more readable than the original article.