Ha. They need to sue Google and other search engines that provide caches. Good luck with that.
Second, it's not infromation that's protectable by copyright (at least not in the US). It's like the telephone book as others have said.
There's heaps of websites that mistakenly believe they have some copyrights to assert against users that harvest data. But it's not just websites. A longstanding, classic example of this sort of silly argument is WHOIS. The registries can't stand the thought of others getting the data. They claim bandwidth is an issue. Yet they won't provide (mirrored) bulk data, which would easily resolve any such bandwidth claims. They purport to "license" the right to do things with the data, yet they have no rights to grant to begin with. It is public data.
Then there's the "spam issue". As if email is somehow different from direct mail, and from telemarketing. Why don't we outlaw those practices?
Anyhow, again, it's public data: addresses and phone numbers. We call it the telephone book. If, e.g., a brokerage wants to have its summer interns do cold calling to solicit new institutional investors, the interns do not need a "license to use the telephone book". If someone listed in the phone directory does not want to be called, there's no law that says they have to be listed; they can use a nonlisted phone number.
People who list with CL presumably want their information to be found and to be presented in an appealing way. Maybe not exclusively on CL. Maybe CL should ask them what they would prefer.
Second, it's not infromation that's protectable by copyright (at least not in the US). It's like the telephone book as others have said.
There's heaps of websites that mistakenly believe they have some copyrights to assert against users that harvest data. But it's not just websites. A longstanding, classic example of this sort of silly argument is WHOIS. The registries can't stand the thought of others getting the data. They claim bandwidth is an issue. Yet they won't provide (mirrored) bulk data, which would easily resolve any such bandwidth claims. They purport to "license" the right to do things with the data, yet they have no rights to grant to begin with. It is public data.
Then there's the "spam issue". As if email is somehow different from direct mail, and from telemarketing. Why don't we outlaw those practices?
Anyhow, again, it's public data: addresses and phone numbers. We call it the telephone book. If, e.g., a brokerage wants to have its summer interns do cold calling to solicit new institutional investors, the interns do not need a "license to use the telephone book". If someone listed in the phone directory does not want to be called, there's no law that says they have to be listed; they can use a nonlisted phone number.
People who list with CL presumably want their information to be found and to be presented in an appealing way. Maybe not exclusively on CL. Maybe CL should ask them what they would prefer.