Court Awards $60 Million for Unauthorized Website “Scraping”
On April 13, 2017, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California awarded $60.6 million in damages to website Craigslist Inc. from RadPad, Inc., a competitor who had scraped and used data from the Craigslist website, including after receiving a “cease and desist” letter and after Craigslist obtained a permanent injunction against RadPad’s third-party listings provider and its other customers for similar activities. This case and the prior related case discussed in this memorandum, offer three important lessons for companies that obtain or use data collected from third-party websites without a license.