Real Estate Listing Scraping Not Unfair Competition Under UWG Article 5 lit. c Due to Defendant's Effort

The appellate court upheld the lower court's dismissal of a claim alleging unfair competition under Article 5 lit. c of the Unfair Competition Act (UWG), where the defendant systematically and automatically harvested, filtered, processed, and augmented real estate listings from the plaintiffs' online platforms using their own software programs (a search spider). The court reasoned that Article 5 lit. c, which prohibits taking over and exploiting another's market-ready work without appropriate own effort through technical reproduction means, requires assessing the defendant's total effort, including subsequent development and variation, and found that the defendant's process of programming, maintaining, filtering, and enriching the collected data with their own value-added information constituted a sufficient, non-minimal effort, thus precluding a finding of unfairness under that specific provision, and rendering recourse to the general unfair competition clause unnecessary.