In October 2025, the Danish Maritime and Commercial Court issued a decision in a case concerning whether ReData A/S infringed BoligPortal A/S’s rights by scraping data from BoligPortal’s website and making it available to the public. The court determined that BoligPortal’s database was protected under sui generis database rights, that ReData had infringed these rights by extracting and using a substantial part of the database, and that its conduct violated good marketing practice under the Marketing Practices Act.
Background
The plaintiff, BoligPortal A/S, operates the rental housing portal boligportal.dk, which describes itself as Denmark’s largest rental housing portal, connecting landlords and home seekers.
The defendant, ReData, collects, processes, and sells property data. Its business involves collecting publicly available data from sources such as the BBR, the Land Registration Court, the digital building case archive, boligejer.dk, and the Danish tax authority (SKAT), and combining these data to provide a market overview for professional actors.
BoligPortal became aware that ReData had been harvesting data from BoligPortal’s API. During the proceedings, ReData confirmed that it had been collecting eight specific data points, including, for example, location coordinates, offered rent, number of rooms, and energy label. BoligPortal considered this an infringement of its sui generis database rights.
BoligPortal initiated proceedings against ReData, requesting a prohibition on scraping, a prohibition on making the scraped data available to the public, and deletion of the scraped data. The court granted the prohibitions but refused to order deletion. In deciding the claims, the court carried out an analysis that can be grouped into three questions, as outlined below.
1. Is BoligPortal the holder of a database protected by sui generis database rights?
The court assessed whether the collection, verification, or presentation of the database content involved a substantial investment, as required for protection under the Danish Copyright Act and the EU Database Directive (96/9/EC). Recital 40 of the Database Directive clarifies that such investment may consist of financial resources or the expenditure of time, effort, and energy.
The court found that tenancy information on boligportal.dk is entered by landlords, and that information is verified through both automated checks against public registers (such as the BBR) and by customer service calling landlords to have the entered information confirmed. The court also noted BoligPortal’s significant investment in developing its IT platform and in the ongoing marketing, verification, and presentation of the data on the website. Accordingly, the court concluded that boligportal.dk is the result of a substantial investment and constitutes a database protected under the Copyright Act.
2. If BoligPortal’s database is protected, did ReData infringe BoligPortal’s database rights by scraping data?
Since the court determined that the database is protected, BoligPortal holds the exclusive right to dispose of the content of the database as a whole or a substantial part thereof by reproduction or by making the content available to the public. This exclusive right is subject to an exception for extraction and reproduction for the purposes of text and data mining, as set forth in the Copyright Act and Directive (EU) 2019/790 on Copyright in the Digital Single Market (the DSM Directive). The Copyright Act further prescribes that the database holder may reserve these exclusive rights and derogate from the exception. Accordingly, the court’s assessment of infringement depended on (i) whether BoligPortal had validly reserved its rights, i.e. effectively derogated from the protection exception, and (ii) whether ReData had extracted and used a substantial part of the database.
Has BoligPortal reserved the exclusive right to extract and reproduce the database for text and data mining in an “appropriate manner”?
The Copyright Act allows a database holder to reserve the exclusive right to reproduce or make the content available to the public, provided that such reservation is made in an “appropriate manner”. As clarified by the DSM Directive, an appropriate manner of reservation may include machine-readable means, including metadata and website terms and conditions.
BoligPortal’s data and privacy policy prohibits data mining, scraping, and crawling from boligportal.dk, boligmanager.dk, and Datainsights.dk. ReData argued that the reservation was not made in an “appropriate manner” as required by the DSM Directive, asserting that BoligPortal should have used a machine-readable “robots.txt” file to block scraping. BoligPortal explained that it had not implemented such a measure because it was unaware of ReData’s scraping activities. Specifically, excluding a scraping bot via “robots.txt” requires knowledge of the bot’s name. BoligPortal stated that its open “robots.txt” file is intentional, allowing search engines to index the website. Accordingly, boligportal.dk’s “robots.txt” file does not contain a list of bots that are prohibited from crawling the site.
The court found that the data and privacy policy has been accessible in a machine-readable format – specifically, in HTML format – via a footer link on boligportal.dk. Accordingly, the court concluded that BoligPortal had reserved its rights in an appropriate manner, from which it follows that ReData’s argument regarding the absence of blocking through a robots.txt file was rejected.
Has ReData collected and used a substantial part of the database?
The court lacked sufficient evidence to determine whether ReData’s use involved a substantial part of BoligPortal’s database quantitatively. However, under Article 7(1) of the Database Directive, protection also extends to qualitative substantiality. The CJEU has clarified this in British Horseracing Board (C‑203/02, judgment of 9 November 2004, para. 71), stating that a qualitatively substantial part depends on the scale of the investment in obtaining, verifying, or presenting the data. Even a quantitatively insignificant part of the contents can be substantial if it represents significant human, technical, or financial investment.
3. Is ReData’s conduct contrary to good marketing practice under the Marketing Practices Act – i.e., “free riding”?
By systematically scraping essential rental housing data from boligportal.dk over several years and incorporating it into its own platform, ReData effectively free rode on BoligPortal’s investment in building its database. The court found ReData’s conduct to contravene section 3 of the Marketing Practices Act on good marketing practice.
Comment
The decision clarifies that, for the manner of reserving the exclusive right to extract and reproduce the database for text and data mining to be “appropriate” – i.e. made in machine-readable format – it is not necessary to block scraping through a robots.txt file. Instead, a data and privacy policy, accessible on the website in HTML format, prohibiting data mining, scraping, and crawling, suffices.
Another interesting aspect of the decision is how the fact of copying by ReData was established. Upon detecting indications of data scraping, BoligPortal investigated whether ReData was engaging in such activity by creating 12 advertisements containing fictitious data. Shortly thereafter, BoligPortal discovered that these same fictitious details had been reproduced on ReData’s platform, despite not corresponding to any other publicly available information regarding the properties in question. Case law in some other jurisdictions also offers examples of this method of proving defendant’s reproduction of plaintiff’s database. For example, in Spain in 2010, Infonis initiated proceedings against IMS Health for copying its pharmaceutical marketing database, ZBSales, to create a similar database, Sanibricks. The courts compared the two databases and determined that Sanibricks contained identical errors present in ZBSales, making it unlikely that the similarities between the databases were coincidental.
