Innoweb v Wegener: CJEU, Sui Generis database right and making available to the public - The war against the machines

Wegener ICT Media BV and Wegener Mediaventions BV (collectively Wegener) provide in the Netherlands through the website www.autotrack.nl (Autotrack) an online access to daily updated 190-200,000 used car sales advertisements, of which 40,000 are available only via Autotrack. The website has its own search function and it displays also other advertisements as supplementary means of accruing income. Innoweb BV (Innoweb) has built a meta search engine “GasPedaal” providing a single-query access to several other websites displaying used cars sales advertisements Autotrack being one of the sites containing them. According to further search criteria such as price, make, model mileage, manufacturing year and others, one can make a further refined search with a single query yielding results from several other websites together with links to those other websites. As a result of GasPedaal‟s popularity, the users‟ searches cause GasPedaal web crawler carry out some 100,000 searches daily in Wegener‟s Autotrack site, among other used car sales databases.