Suppose I build a scrapper to grab listings off yellowpages.com and sell that database? Is this legal? Does Yellow Pages have cause of action to sue me because I am selling their information or does this information become public since it is detailed freely on the web without any paid subscriptions?
have you read the actual terms? Just because it's there doesn't mean it's public domain. If they give it to you for free it doesn't mean you can sell it.
It is illegal and breaking copyright laws. Yellowpages have built up a massive amount of listings over time and invested a lot of money in all areas of their service. Of course they will have cause to sue you if you're scraping data they spent a lot of resources on collecting. You may not even have permission to use the data because the companies may have an exclusive contract with yellowpages and there's so many privacy issues around it I wouldn't bother. If I was in their shoes and discovered someone doing what you want to do, I'd take them for every penny I could. And as pitagora stated, just because it's freely available online doesn't mean you have any claim to it at all. I also think several other companies provide data that's included so you'll have to face them too.
This specific example is one case where it could very well be legal, depending on how you do it. This only would apply to a site like YellowBook. The reason is that all of the information they have would be considered facts, which by definition are not copyrightable. A database can be copyrighted, but not due to the amount of work put in to creating it, rather based on uniqueness and non-standard layout. Check out this case, which is directly on point for this question.
The druid is, I fear, correct. As far as I know, you can't copyright a list. And this would be a list of course.
As a follow up to the last question asked by the OP, no the information does not become public because it is visible to the public. That would be like saying if you hear a song on the radio you can do whatever you want with it. What is controlling here is that the data in question is a set of facts.
Is it fair to say that copying YellowPages.com with their logo and claiming it as your own would be a breach of copyright laws, but taking addresses from their web site isn't "copyright-able" because addresses are considered facts?
Well, their logo would be a trademark issue, but yes. Now let's say on their listing they also had a list of related search terms for each listing. If you were to copy that information and put it in your database that would be an issue. Addresses and phone numbers are not protected.