Auction houses face off in website data scraping lawsuit
NEW YORK — Christie’s auction house has been accused in a lawsuit of using a computer program to scrape research, images and price information from a rival’s website and then reselling it as part of its own subscription database.
The copyright infringement lawsuit, announced Monday, accuses London-based Christie’s and its independently operated subsidiary Collectrium of unlawfully appropriating nearly 3 million auction sale item listings from a website maintained by Dallas-based Heritage Auctions.
Those listings wound up being used in Collectrium’s searchable proprietary database of more than 11 million items, the lawsuit says.