Table of Contents
- 5 Famous Web Scraping Court Cases Where Scrapers Lost
- 1) eBay v. Bidder's Edge (N.D. Cal. 2000) - injunction against an auction-aggregator crawler
- 2) Register.com v. Verio (2d Cir. 2004) - injunction upheld for automated WHOIS harvesting
- 3) Facebook v. Power Ventures (9th Cir. 2016) - post-notice automation treated as unauthorized access
- 4) Associated Press v. Meltwater (S.D.N.Y. 2013) - news scraping + excerpts held not fair use
- 5) Ryanair DAC v. Flightbox (Ireland, 2023) - default judgment + injunction over screen scraping
5 Famous Web Scraping Court Cases Where Scrapers Lost
Web scraping is not automatically legal or illegal.
Legality depends on what you access (public vs. behind login), what you copy (facts vs. creative expression), how you access it (respecting access controls and technical measures), what the Terms of Service say (contract), and which jurisdiction applies (US vs. EU/UK rules can differ a lot).
If you want a practical baseline before reading case law, start with the boring-but-important ethics and operational behavior:
- Web Scraping Ethics: What is legal and what is not?
- How to Build a Web Crawler
- What is the difference between web crawling and scraping?
This post is not legal advice.
1) eBay v. Bidder's Edge (N.D. Cal. 2000) - injunction against an auction-aggregator crawler
Who scraped whom: Bidder's Edge scraped eBay.
What data: Auction listings and bidding status.
Claims that mattered: The case is widely cited for applying trespass to chattels reasoning to automated access.
What the court did: A preliminary injunction was granted, barring automated query programs/robots/crawlers from accessing eBay's systems without written authorization.
Practical takeaway: Even when the load looks "small," ignoring objections and scaling an automation pattern can get framed as unauthorized interference. If blocks and explicit objections are being pushed through, it is easier for a court to treat it as wrongful access rather than normal browsing.
Sources:
- eBay, Inc. v. Bidder's Edge, Inc., 100 F. Supp. 2d 1058 (N.D. Cal. 2000): http://www.tomwbell.com/NetLaw/Ch06/eBay.html
2) Register.com v. Verio (2d Cir. 2004) - injunction upheld for automated WHOIS harvesting
Who scraped whom: Verio scraped Register.com's WHOIS service.
What data: WHOIS registrant contact details harvested via automated queries and used for solicitation.
Claims that mattered: The Second Circuit credited contract / ToS-based arguments (with repeated use after notice), and also addressed related trespass to chattels and marketing/confusion concerns.
What the court did: A preliminary injunction was affirmed, restricting automated access and certain downstream uses of harvested WHOIS data.
Practical takeaway: "No click = no contract" is not a safe assumption when the terms are repeatedly encountered and the scraper has notice. Pairing scraping with unsolicited marketing tends to make the whole case worse.
Sources:
- Register.com, Inc. v. Verio, Inc., 356 F.3d 393 (2d Cir. 2004) (summary + PDF link): http://www.internetlibrary.com/cases/lib_case392.cfm
- Opinion PDF: http://www.internetlibrary.com/pdf/register-verio-2d-cir.pdf
3) Facebook v. Power Ventures (9th Cir. 2016) - post-notice automation treated as unauthorized access
Who accessed whom: Power Ventures accessed Facebook.
What data: Facebook user data and user-initiated messaging flows were accessed/triggered through automation; access continued after Facebook objected and technical blocking measures were involved.
Claims that mattered: The opinion is widely cited for how "authorization" was analyzed in the CFAA context when access continued after notice and blocks.
What the court did: The Ninth Circuit affirmed key parts of Facebook's win (and reversed/vacated other pieces), leaving Power Ventures in a losing posture on core theories tied to post-notice, post-block access.
Practical takeaway: When scraping/automation relies on user credentials or tokens and is continued after explicit objection and blocking steps, it stops looking like "public web scraping" and starts looking like access-control evasion.
Sources:
- Facebook, Inc. v. Power Ventures, Inc., 844 F.3d 1058 (9th Cir. 2016) (PDF): https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2016/07/12/13-17102.pdf
4) Associated Press v. Meltwater (S.D.N.Y. 2013) - news scraping + excerpts held not fair use
Who scraped whom: Meltwater scraped AP's news content and sold a monitoring product that included excerpts.
What data: Headlines/ledes/excerpts/snippets from AP articles (copyrighted expression).
Claims that mattered: Copyright infringement was found and Meltwater's fair use arguments were rejected in the decision.
What the court did: Summary judgment was granted against Meltwater on core copyright issues, limiting the "scrape + redistribute snippets" pattern when it looks like a paid substitute for the original.
Practical takeaway: Scraping facts is one thing; republishing expressive text at scale is another. If the output competes with the publisher (or replaces reading the source), fair use becomes hard to defend.
Sources:
- Opinion (archived): https://digitalcommons.law.scu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1321&context=historical
- U.S. Copyright Office Fair Use Index summary: https://www.copyright.gov/fair-use/summaries/ap-meltwater-sdny2013.pdf
5) Ryanair DAC v. Flightbox (Ireland, 2023) - default judgment + injunction over screen scraping
Who scraped whom: Flightbox (a tech provider) was alleged to facilitate screen scraping of Ryanair.
What data: Flight/price/timetable data extracted via automated software and surfaced in third-party flows.
Claims that mattered: The case turned heavily on website terms of use, procedural/jurisdiction mechanics, and breach-related theories. (This was a default judgment; the defendant did not enter an appearance.)
What the court did: Judgment in default was allowed and injunctive and declaratory relief was granted, including a prohibitory injunction and a quia timet injunction (aimed at preventing likely future breach).
Practical takeaway: Outside the US, scraping fights often turn on contract/terms + injunction mechanics. If access is structured around assent-based terms, injunctive relief can follow.
Sources:
- Law firm analysis (citing [2023] IEHC 689): https://www.mhc.ie/latest/insights/screen-scraping-latest-jurisdiction-and-default-judgment-confirmed
- Case summary: https://www.casemine.com/judgement/uk/6581ef6c86838c62d2fc4551
Closing: what these losses do (and do not) mean
These cases do not mean "scraping is always illegal." They show that legality depends on context.
Patterns that show up again and again:
- Public page is not the same as permission to automate at scale.
- Notice + continued access (especially with block evasion) tends to be a turning point.
- Copying expressive content (not just facts) escalates risk quickly.
- Courts often reach for injunction-shaped remedies when ongoing automation is framed as interference, breach, or substitution.
If scraping must be done, risk is usually reduced by:
- Getting permission or using an official API/license when it exists.
- Reading (and following) ToS; re-checking it periodically.
- Avoiding auth bypass and avoiding block-evasion patterns.
- Implementing strict rate limits, backoff, and respecting 429/Retry-After.
- Respecting robots.txt and honoring opt-outs.
- Minimizing what is copied (fields only; avoid republishing expressive text).
- Being careful with personal data (privacy rules still apply even to "public" pages).