In USA is datamining legal ?

[domaingenius]

I am wondering if in the USA datamining is legal ?. If someone owns copyright on the content of the whois ,and it is a criminal (as opposed to civil which it would be as well) offence to mine such data and a US Company goes on regardless and mines such data, would that be a tort in USA and would damages be obtainable ?. I dont know much about US law, only European laws so would help to know from US view.

DG

[thedomainster]

As far as I know whois info is public so it wouldn't be illegal to mine the data. What information is displayed on whois that feel is copyrighted?

[domaingenius]

As far as I know whois info is public so it wouldn't be illegal to mine the data. What information is displayed on whois that feel is copyrighted?

I was doing some research and found the following statement on a Registrar's whois info;

All information herein Copyright {French Registrar} and contributors.
% All rights reserved.
% Datamining forbidden by copyright law
% Datamining forbidden by criminal law (Code Penal Articles 226 etc.)
% Send inquiries to whois at initialesonline.net

In France it is definately against the criminal code/law. Just figuring out if the French company would have a cause to sue a US company on if the US Company was to ignore such warning ?. I should say the whois info had certain references inserted by the Registrar which identifies the source and that would show up in any collection of data. Just looking and wondering really at the moment

DG

[thedomainster]

Typically a dataminer would be scraping the information from whois like name, address, phone, email address and putting it into a database. This info isn't copyrighted and I don't think this is illegal in the US. There are regulations about how you use the information, ie spam and telemarketing, but not in the act of collecting the data itself.

Are you referring to a certain US company in particular? What are they doing with the data?