My company, Alan Ross Machinery, is the plaintiff in this case. Happy to answer questions to the extent legal counsel will permit it. I can tell you the case remains active, stay tuned...
My guess is by acting as a central authority for all used equipment deals (bootstrapped by scraping listings from many sources), they were able to use the existence of the listings to better convince future dealers to just list directly with them instead of your business? e.g. increased exposure for dealers, Machinio doesn't take a commission, so dealers just pay a flat rate to gain exposure?
At the end of the day, I have to assume the litigation was over them stealing dealers by disintermediating you? Because otherwise I'm guessing they'd just argue they were providing you free exposure.
Seems like you're trying to have your cake and eat it too. You're presumably happy for Google to scrape your website (and collect your customers' data for their purposes like ad tracking), but when a smaller site does it you're not happy? Make up your mind.
What benefit does scraping your site give someone else? If someone posts your listings on their site, how do they connect would-be buyers with the sellers, anyway?
Yes, but notices matter for purposes beyond whether copyright exists, and therefore falsifying, removing, or modifying them also matters.
This wasn't about infringement (oddly enough) but about falsified or removed “copyright management information”, specifically the copyright notices.
Which seems odd, because if the original notices were valid, then I can't see why actual infringement wasn't alleged. OTOH, if there was no infringement, how could the thing presented been the thing covered by the notices, such that either the removal or falsification claims had substance?
They are literally checking with their lawyers about what they can and cannot answer. I think they're OK.