The plaintiff wasn't claiming a copyright infringement, it was trying to claim specifically for removal of the copyright notice, which is a separate cause of action under the DMCA.
Removal of copyright notice from material that's not actually under copyright?
I'm sorry if I'm not understanding something simple, I tried a quick google search and came up with this [0], but that seems to apply to cases where you remove copyright notice from copyrighted work.
It appears that no argument was made as to whether the material was actually under copyright or not, because the plaintiff wasn't alleging copyright infringement. You could perhaps read into this that it was something of an ambit claim.
I don't know exactly which website the case is about, but maybe the plaintiff couldn't claim copyright infringement because they don't own any copyright over the scraped content in the first place, i.e. the listings were posted by users.
