who owns the data? They are sometimes or mostly just scraping publicly available info in potentially illegal ways in the first place so how can they then claim copyright on the data they have that is publicly available anyway?

Example:

CBInsights admits to scraping data of newspapers which I believe is illegal to then use for commercial gain, are they claiming they have legal contracts with every newspaper?

"We crawl over 12,000 information sources daily ranging from local, national, and international news publications to SEC filings to investor and corporate websites to social media sources and parse out structured data elements including company name, investor names, amounts, Board of Director names, etc. programmatically. "

http://www.cbinsights.com/venture-capital-database