Contractual Perspectives on Web Scraping: A Comparative Analysis of Database Protection in the European Union and the United States

The present work proposes to discuss the legal implications of the web scraping phenomenon. To this aim, the focus is placed upon the state of the art of the litigation scenario and the possible legal solutions that could be adopted to harmonize the current regulatory framework. As far as the methodology is concerned, the phenomenon is analyzed from a comparative perspective. Each and every means of protection exposed throughout the dissertation is indeed discussed by taking into account the implications it might have both from the U.S. and the European standpoint, thereby evaluating whether similar solutions could be possibly reached on both sides of the Atlantic. On this point, the paper proposes to compare the different approaches that the U.S. and the European case-law have adopted towards the applicable database protection regimes. Against this background, particular attention is eventually given to the role of contract law in the regulation of automated data extraction techniques.