Services like Dapper, Yahoo Pipes and Feedity facilitate the creation of mashups that are essentially built off other sites' data by retrieving that data as a convenient RSS feed.
Why do we not see more intellectual property lawsuits as a result of these recent applications of screen scraping?
I was looking at the Wikipedia entry for web scraping:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_scraping
Under the "Legal Issues" section it talks about the tort issue called "Trespass To Chattels" which covers a wide variety of computer trespass crimes, including web scraping but from what I can tell there are very few recent lawsuits with respect to web scraping. The big one was Ticketmaster vs Tickets.com but that was back in 2000:
http://www.tomwbell.com/NetLaw/Ch07/Ticketmaster.html
Sites like popurls, alltop, google news, aggregate data from other news sites. According to copyright law, this should be permissable as long as the quote is limited and not a complete republication. These sites seem to follow this guideline.
But are there other recent sites that do not, who you would expect to fall afoul of the law? How do they avoid litigation - by asking the originating site for permission to republish? By paying the content owners for the privilege to republish? Or has the commonness of the Web2.0ish way of regurgitating content made this a moot issue by now - to the point where most original content owners have given up on trying to control the ownership of their content through litigation?
Flickr is all about sharing and it tries pretty hard to give the users tools to control access to data and to express their licensing intent. For example, as much as is possible, there is simply no trace of private data in searches that don't have proper authorization. For public data, it is not a given that you can republish or modify the work. So the atom feeds have links to the licenses for each photo or video, and the API has similar features when obtaining photo info.
Users are able to grant a mashup app access to their private data in a formalized way (and to revoke it later). Finally, Flickr is also able to revoke the rights of any particular app to download data or simply throttle them to a reasonable amount per day.
All sites that offer RSS or an API should do these sorts of things. (The oAuth standard is a formalization of some of the techniques that sites like Flickr use.)