Tennessee IP Law Blog

Compulife Software Inc. v. Newman , No. 18-12004, 2020 WL 2549505 (11th Cir. May 20, 2020) Topic:  Trade Secrets & Misappropriation Takeaways: Publicly available data obtained through large-scale data scraping hack of Compulife's system should not have been considered on an individual piece-by-piece basis of the insurance quote data obtained, but rather the aggregate block of information obtained when considering an improper means and trade-secret appropriation analysis. A site's lack of usage restriction regarding publicly available information does not automatically make Data Scraping through robotic means proper. Court generally opines that using a bot to collect "infeasible amounts" of data through data/web scraping may be improper means. This is Part II to the discussion of Compulife Software Inc. v. Newman .  Part I, addressing the Copyright aspect of this case, is available at: https://tennesseetechnologylaw.blogspot.com/2020/05/abstr...

Compulife Software Inc. v. Newman , No. 18-12004, 2020 WL 2549505 (11th Cir. May 20, 2020) Topic:  Abstraction/Filtration Anaylsis & Burden Shifting Takeaway:  After an infringement plaintiff has demonstrated that he holds a valid copyright and that the defendant engaged in factual copying, the defendant bears the burden of proving—as part of the filtration analysis—that the elements he copied from a copyrighted work are unprotectable. Overall, this is a very in depth and complicated case that involves multiple aspects of IP law. As such, this post is limited to the issue of copyright infringement and protectability under the abstraction/filtration test. Check back next week for part 2 regarding the trade-secret issues! naaip.org/logo             compulife.com Background & Parties There’s nothing easy about this case. The facts are complicated, and the governing law is tangled. At its essence, it’s a case about h...