1.
INNOWEB V WEGENER CJEU JUDGMENT – SCRAPING
DATABASES
This case concerned a Dutch search engine for cars (Wegener)
and a Dutch meta search engine (Innoweb). Innoweb allowed users to search
for cars by searching other databases, including Wegener’s database.
Wegener applied (successfully in the first instance)
to the Dutch courts under sui generis for protection of its
database. Innoweb appealed the decision and the Dutch courts stayed the
proceeding in order to refer a number of questions to the EU Court of
Justice. In staying its ruling, the Dutch appeal court stated that it
recognised that Wegener’s database was protected, but did not believe Innoweb’s
use was an infringement of Article 7(5) of Directive 96/9 (which protects
databases) as Innoweb was extracting “insubstantial parts of the database” and
was therefore having no cumulative effect on Wegener.
However, the EU Court of Appeal found that a meta
search engine (one that uses search engines provided by other websites to
retrieve results) infringes database rights where it:
- Provides a search form which replicates the functionality of the search form on the target website;
- Enables a search of the entire database in the target website; and
- Presents the results of the user’s search in an equivalent way to the target website.
The decision is very fact specific to the
Wegener/Innoweb scenario (you can read it in full here)
and is a European decision, but it is reportedly a departure from previous EU
decisions, giving broader protection of databases from scraping – essentially,
the decision means in the EU, if an unlicensed scraping service enables the
search of the entirety of a third party website’s databases, it could be in
breach (even if it’s only scraping a single grouping of data in response to a
user query).
