listing. Boat Rover extracted the facts by momentarily copying the HTML of the web page
containing the yacht listing and then collecting the prescribed facts, entering the facts into a
searchable database, and then discarding the HTML.^3378
Second, NSM offered a “valet service” under which, with the permission of a yacht
broker who owned a yacht listing on another web site, it would move, delete or modify the yacht
broker’s listing. Under this service, Yachtbroker.com copied and pasted certain content,
including pictures and descriptions (but not the HTML for the entire web page), from yacht
listings on Yachtworld.com and posted the content on Yachtbroker.com in a different format.
Although the copied content posted on Yachtbroker.com contained many of the same descriptive
headings as the original listings on Yachtworld.com, the court found that the headings were the
industry standard for yacht listings on yacht brokering web sites.^3379
NSM filed an action for a declaratory judgment that its two services did not infringe
Boats.com’s copyrights, which the court granted. The court ruled that Boats.com’s copyright of
Yachtworld.com’s public web pages in order to extract from yacht listings facts unprotected by
copyright law constituted a fair use.^3380 The court further ruled that the copyrights in the pictures
and descriptions of yachts copied by the valet service were owned by the individual yacht
brokers, not Boats.com, and such copying was therefore not infringing. Nor was copying of the
headings an infringement, because the headings, being industry standards, were not protected by
copyright.^3381 Boats.com also claimed a copyright in the look and feel of the Yachtworld.com
web site that it alleged had been copied by Yachtbroker.com. The court rejected this claim,
finding that the two web sites were quite dissimilar in appearance.^3382 Finally, the court rejected
a claim of infringement in a compilation copyright over the yacht listings on Yachtworld.com.
The court held that, because the format used by NSM to display on Yachtbroker.com the content
copied from Yachtworld.com differed from the format used by Yachtworld.com to display the
same information, the compilation of yacht listings on Yachtbroker.com was not virtually
identical and was therefore not infringing.^3383
- Craigslist v. 3Taps
In this case, Craigslist brought claims, among others, of copyright infringement against a
number of defendants based on their activity of aggregating and republishing ads from Craigslist
and, in the case of the defendant 3Taps, marketing a “Craigslist API” that allowed third parties to
access large amounts of content from Craigslist. The defendants brought a motion to dismiss on
the ground that neither the individual ad postings nor Craigslist’s compilation of them were
(^3378) Nautical Solutions Marketing, Inc. v. Boats.com, No. 8:02-cv-760-T-23TGW (M.D. Fla. Apr. 2, 2004), slip op.
at 1-2.
(^3379) Id. at 3-4.
(^3380) Id. at 4.
(^3381) Id. at 5.
(^3382) Id. at 6.
(^3383) Id. at 7.