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Ask HN: How can companies sell confidential information and scraped data?
There are companies which are built around selling confidential information such as trade secrets, or information they have scraped from other sites. Some examples:
* 80legs.com, which scrapes data from Yelp
* clearbit.com, which has data on employees at companies, and is probably scraping Yelp and LinkedIn
* pitchbook.com, which allegedly has insider information on VC deals and sounds like CrunchBase but with information you'll never find publicly
* esharesinc.com, which seems to provide insider information on capitalization tables and secondary offerings (maybe it's opt-in)
How do these companies manage to succeed despite what I presume must be a giant legal threat?