Introduction
Is it legal for a company to extract data from another company’s website? Can a company use the other company’s interface information4 to extract or upload data or invoke the functionality of the other company’s software? What if the other company objects?
Interactions between systems are largely governed by the same laws that are used to protect software: copyright law, trade secret/confidential information law, patent law, and contract rights. However, the interactions between computing systems have additional considerations— related to rights associated with interoperability, the “ownership” of data, and the invoking of functionality of another company’s software or systems. There is also a new legal player in town: the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (“CFAA”).
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