OP here - I did some pretty heavy research on this topic to make sure I'd be okay publishing this / automating anything at all. From what I looked into (and mind you, I'm a 23 year old security researcher & not a lawyer) there are a few recent landmark court cases (Van Buren vs. United States, hiQ Labs vs. LinkedIn) that protect webscraping of a public-facing page without bypass of any technological barriers. Furthermore, Florida has the Computer Abuse and Data Recovery Act that defines any malicious behavior as overuse of resources or an intent to defraud or cause harm, both of which I was very conscious about not violating. I appreciate the concern regardless!
After receiving the C&D, the method with which I was getting the data was removed/patched (which I'm now noticing was not mentioned in the blog post...) I did ask them if there was any thing I could to keep it up and never received a response, and rather than playing a cat & mouse game of "now you don't have our branding, but you are scraping are data so here's another C&D" I just took it down :)
I believe scraping is generally ok - there's actual trademark law about trademarks, which is why you got a c+d about trademark usage, instead of a general 'stop what you're doing we don't like it' c+d.
A good point of comparison is steam db (and other similar sites), which uses Steam public info to triangulate market info that isn't immediately apparent.
> This third-party website gives you better insight into the Steam platform and everything in its database.
It clearly states that it's not affiliated with Steam and is a separate organization. There's also a further disclaimer in the footer of the page.
In contrast, the "Waffle House Index" had the Waffle House logo at the top of the page, with zero explanation or elaboration on who created the website.
this is a bummer - scraping is one thing but this was free marketing for them. If only they put their marketing department in front of their legal department (assuming they have a marketing department)
"Waffle House is so reliably open that FEMA uses it to measure hurricane devastation" is a great piece of marketing.
If you're tired, hung over, or really hungry, you can always stumble into a Waffle House at any time and get something to eat. If you can't, there are bigger problems in your life (hurricane, zombies, tornadoes).
It doesn't take much for that to become "TIL Waffle House's owners are so greedy they force their employees to work even during a natural disaster when other businesses are closed". No it's pretty obvious why Waffle House would want to stay far away from this sort of publicity and have very tight control on anything said about it, especially if that publicity looks like it comes from them or is in any way endorsed by them.
Except for the long list of stories that have detailed how they actually do this - they have special disaster teams that fly or drive in for the purpose. And where do all the power and other utility linemen eat between their triple-pay shifts in a disaster area? At Waffle House, because it’s always open.
Too late to edit, but: after a disaster, you can go to my nearest WH and watch truck after truck roll by full of utility employees staying at the hotels near it.
That's an oversimplification. WH could also reach out and offer to work out a deal with the site owner to license use of their trademark. That would probably entail some compensation (which could be anything from "good will" or a token cash amount, up to millions of dollars) and probably some verbiage on the page reading something along the lines of "Logos and identifiers on this page are the property of Waffle House, Inc and are used under license" or whatever.
of course i would love to live in a world where waffle house can be as off the rails whimsy as kfc, but im just pointing out why not to get your hopes too high!
After the initial legal letter they could have licensed / agreed to the usage, or taken over the running of the website. There are several ways to protect their trademark without being killjoys.
The equivalent would be a simple text list of all Waffle Houses currently closed, sourced by physically visiting each location and noting any closures. The author here used Waffle House's branding and logos, and also sourced the data by scraping their web site.
The Economist editors don’t blog to reproduce every letter they receive from attorneys, and they don’t taunt McDonald’s on social media, and probably don’t host the website that tracks operational status of soft serve machines.
I do think Legal would be worried about a site they don't own potentially being wrong about store openings and customer being upset, let alone risking travel through a storm to get there. Trademark was the easy one to get
As long as you didn’t actively agree to anything, you are not held to the Terms of Service for a public website. There are restrictions on what you can do with the data, mostly around direct competition with the source (I’m not a lawyer, so DYOR). The average scraping volume from Google and AI companies would make an indie site’s scraping volume look minuscule.
Check out this wild case to see how far you can go with scraping and remain legal. It’s surprising.
If the WH legal dogs needed this as an the impetus for that change in 2020s, then they aren't very good legal dogs. ToS updates are pretty common, and if some one didn't like scraping, you'd think that unauthorized text would be added some time ago. It's not like scraping is a new thing. If they are savvy legal teams, this should pretty much be boiler plate language. Only neophyte legal teams would not expect scraping as something to expend ink.
Author here - I absolutely do have more to learn about trademarks and appreciate everyones comments :) I was attempting to go for a good faith representation but (obviously) now know that wasn't the best way to go about it.
As far as rigorous research, I looked semi-heavily and couldn't find anything in relation to it. I'm sure it's not a foreign concept to use local area data in this way for disaster planning though!
