A comparative study on public interest considerations in data scraping dispute

Abstract New technologies and the new business practices that they bring often raise difficult questions about the application of the law. This often stems from the difficulty of clarifying the impact of new technologies on the interests of different groups in society and, in particular, the difficulty of measuring the public interest brought about by new technologies. In practice, in disputes arising from new technologies, the users of the new technologies often justify their actions in terms of the public interest. In this paper, we compare data collection cases in the US, EU and China and extract the types of public interests discussed in typical cases in different countries, including (1) data-related property rights protection and commercial principles to prevent free-riding; (2) privacy, personal data protection and data security; (3) competition and innovation interests related to the free flow of data; and (4) freedom of expression. The comparison shows that an appropriate focus on the public interest in data flow has led Chinese and US courts to rule in favour of scrapers in a few recent cases, in contrast to the judicial attitude of EU courts, whicht value privacy. The author applauds the attitude of the courts in the US and China and argues that free competition and innovative interests based on data flows are public interests that should be prioritized in data scraping cases.