Exercise 1: Scraping Public Prices — Fine on Copyright, Silent on the Rest — Possible Solution ==================================================================== WHY THIS IS VERY LIKELY FINE FROM A COPYRIGHT STANDPOINT ------------------------------ Per this chapter's own callback to Chapter 1, "bare facts... discovered, not created, and not protectable by copyright at all." Product prices are a textbook example of this category - a price is a fact about what something costs, not a piece of original creative expression. Per this chapter, "scraping this kind of factual data for analysis generally doesn't implicate copyright in any meaningful way." There's no protectable expression being reproduced here at all, so Chapter 3's reproduction right has essentially nothing to attach to. WHAT THIS CONCLUSION DOESN'T TELL YOU ------------------------------ Per this chapter's own opening framework, copyright is only one of three separate legal considerations - "is scraping legal?" also depends on Terms of Service (a contract law question) and whether any technical access barrier had to be bypassed (a CFAA-type question). Confirming the copyright dimension is clear says nothing at all about whether the retail site's own ToS specifically prohibits automated scraping (which would be a real, separate contract law risk regardless of the data being purely factual), or whether reaching the price data required logging in or bypassing some other access control. WHY KEEPING THESE SEPARATE MATTERS HERE SPECIFICALLY ------------------------------ It would be a mistake to conclude "the data is just facts, so we're completely in the clear" - that conclusion only closes out the copyright question. The scraper would still need to separately verify whether the site's ToS addresses scraping and whether the pages in question are genuinely public (no login required), exactly as this chapter's own hiQ Labs discussion frames it, before reaching any overall conclusion about the scraping project as a whole. WHY THIS WORKS AS AN ANSWER ------------------------------ It applies the chapter's own facts-aren't-copyrightable reasoning specifically and correctly to price data, and explicitly flags the two remaining considerations (ToS, access controls) that the copyright conclusion says nothing about, rather than treating "no copyright issue" as equivalent to "no legal issue at all."