Hello! I’m planning to start a local directory of restaurants located in my city, and I was wondering if it’s OK to add some restaurants in the directory by my self? I mean, is it against any copyright (or any way wrong) to add name, address, website and phone number of a company without asking permission? I would pick the data from other websites (e.g. the restaurants own website) or other places where the data is already published… so my directory wouldn’t be the first place where that information is shown (except maybe the website-url).
I can't imagine that it would be illegal to add name, address, etc. of businesses to your website, but honestly speaking I don't really know. Scraping the name, address, etc. from telephone directories, etc. is illegal though.
There should be no problem adding restaurants by yourself, there is no need to ask permission, at least in the US.
it depends where you are collecting the information from.... if it is from their own website then there most likely isnt an issue (again check local laws) however you cannot gather the information from other directories and be careful as some of the larger directories intentionally put fake listings in to catch people out who try and steal data from them.
If you are in the US, then it does not matter where you got the information in this case because the information is comprised of facts. Facts cannot be copyrighted. In the US, the only exception to this is if you copy a database in its entirety and the database is arranged in a way that would not be normally used. A good case to show this is a phone directory dispute. case One company used information from another phone book (which included some fake numbers to be used to determine if content was being used). The courts ruled that there was no infringement because the phone directory only contained facts and the format was not original.