Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Poor analogy. Yelp contains facts and user reviews. Encyclopedias contain facts conveyed through written articles. The writing and reviews may be copyright protected. Facts are not.


Curated collections of facts are absolutely protected by copyright, provided they meet certain criteria. For example you can use that data to create a new curated data set for a different purpose, but you can't just copy all the data and use it in the way it was orriginaly compiled for because that's copying the curation. I can't say authoritatively if Yelp's data is likely to meet these criteria, but we're not talking about copyright violation anyway, we're talking about anti-competitive practices.

Using a dominance in search to scrape data from competitors for use in other services and then link to them from search in preference over the data's source may well be anti-competitive, even if the scraping itself isn't illegal.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: