Toby Headdon
Toby advises on all aspects of intellectual property including dispute resolution, sale and acquisition, licensing and general advisory work. He has acted for clients across a range of sectors including publishing, technology, finance, utilities, real estate and the public sector. He also represents clients in IT disputes.
Toby is recommended by both Chambers & Partners and the Legal 500 directories for intellectual property. He is a professional member of The Law Society, the Society for Computers and Law, the Competition Law Association and the British Literary and Artistic Copyright Association. He also holds Master’s degrees in law from Columbia University (New York), where he was a Fulbright Scholar, and the University of Oxford.
2 Contributions by Toby Headdon
PRACTICE NOTES
Web crawling, indexing, caching and scraping: UK legal issues for website operators—copyright, database right, website terms, data protection, robots.txt, Computer Misuse Act, and post-Brexit/EU considerations
This Practice Note sets out how intellectual property and related rights, together with data protection duties, operate in the setting of web crawling, indexing, caching and scraping, viewed from a website operator’s standpoint.
An explanation of the terminology
The principal concepts of crawling, indexing, caching and scraping are outlined below.
Crawling
Web crawling is the activity whereby automated programmes (often called ‘bots’, ‘spiders’ or simply ‘web crawlers’) are deployed to traverse and read information across the web.
One well-known crawler is Googlebot, which Google uses to copy web pages onto its servers; Google then indexes them (see the section on Indexing) to support searching of the internet. Website operators often provide ‘sitemaps’ (an XML file listing all pages on a site) to assist and enhance search engines’ crawling.
Crawlers can also be put to other uses such as ‘scraping’ (see the section on ‘Scraping’) or collecting email addresses to send unsolicited emails (i.e. spamming).
In addition to search engines, web crawling is also utilised by meta-sites,...
TMT
PRACTICE NOTES
Web Linking in the UK: Copyright (communication to the public and reproduction), trade mark, defamation, Online Safety Act and contractual considerations for website operators
This Practice Note outlines how intellectual property (IP) and other rights arise in relation to linking on the internet, with emphasis on the standpoint of a website operator. See also, Precedent: Linking policy.
Brexit
This Practice Note includes references to case law from the Court of Justice. For guidance on whether decisions of the Court of Justice bind UK courts, see Practice Note: Assimilated law. It also refers to EU-derived domestic legislation (that is, UK statutes that implemented EU law). From IP completion day at 11.00 pm on 31 December 2020 until the end of 2023, these measures were categorised as retained EU law (REUL). Assimilated law is the label given to REUL that remains in force after the end of 2023. The re-categorisation of REUL (and associated terms) as assimilated law indicates a change in its status and treatment under UK law, in that it is generally to be read according to ordinary domestic law and principles...
TMT
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