Public Engines, Inc. v. ReportSee, Inc. [1]

On April 9, 2010, Public Engines, Inc. sued ReportSee, Inc. in federal court claiming breach of contract, hot news misappropriation, interference with contract, false advertising, as well as violations of federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and Utah's Anti-Cyberterrorism Act. Public Engines is seeking damages and preliminary and permanent injunctions.

Public Engines contracts with law enforcement agencies to provide software and services to process crime statistics. It de-identifies the data by removing the specifics of crimes and details of ongoing investigation and makes the crime statistics available to the public through the website CrimeReports.com, which is updated daily. Public Engines describes the CrimeReports website as an"'official' crime information portal for the law enforcement agencies." (Complaint ¶ 21 ).

ReportSee also publishes crime statistic data on its website. According to the complaint, ReportSee collected data from CrimeReports.com by scraping Public Engines' website and published the data on SpotCrime.com, a website that contains advertisements, a commercial use of the data in violation of the terms of service of the CrimeReports website. (Complaint ¶¶ 26, 46-50, 69).