Internet Data Archiving - Legalities & Issues

[BenS1985]

Hello, first time poster here. Forgive me of any newbie mistakes

At any rate, I am looking for legal advice into a start up business idea/project that I have been involved in a little bit of time, but it's only been a hobby.

It has to do with archiving and aggregating sales data for online retail services. Currently, I have found, and have worked with producing sales reports for certain online-based services. Up to this point, it's been a 100% free service I have done as a hobby.

But as time has gone on, I've found out that what I am doing is in an underserved market, and no one reports and sells the data, so my question of legality is 2 fold:

Legal Issues of Archiving Data
My process of archiving the data isn't trademark, nor much of a real secret. However, the process involves in polling user habits and trends of purchases online. In this step of archiving data, I look at specific individuals' purchases, and aggregate the data.

So with this step, the question is if polling users of a retail service (lets say Ebay) legal? If so, in what cases? If not, in what cases? The data would be obtained without consent, since it's "public" data - any random person can click on said Ebay profile and find out their user history...All without agreeing to Terms of Service, or signing up to the said website.

Legal Issues of Selling said Archived Data
Up to this point, I haven't had any issues with doing what I do - if anything, it's been very appreciated by the market I serve in, as data is almost impossible to come by, since it's exclusively farmed by the retailer. Should I farm the data (if it's legal), are there any issues with selling the data?

Essentially, I would be polling users, aggregating the data, then selling the data as my own to companies interested in said data. Services do this in the real world such as the National Public Diary (NPD Group), but they do it via POS (point of sale) data, and consumer surveys.

Any insight into the matter would be much appreciated. If I can't get a good response, I will most likely seek out a local patent/copyright lawyer in my area.

 

[Michael Wechsler]

You really need to speak to an attorney, no question. Without going into detail, since I only have a cursory understanding of your process - here are the facts:

1) You may have copyright rights to your compilation and presentation of data (not trademark) and also a patent (not likely but possible.)

2) Your collection of data from eBay via a spider may be problematic, if this is the method of operation. See the Bidder's Edge case and you can read this article about the case and a new one. I'll paste an excerpt below. Essentially, once you use a spider to "invade" another web site, the use of "trespass" as a cause of action, as if you physically trespassed on the land of another, kicks into effect.

Nautical Solutions Marketing Inc. won a legal case recently that dealt with issues similar to eBay's lawsuit against Bidders Edge. But in this case, the aggregator proved it was not violating copyright when it extracted information from a competitor's Web site.