How to stop someone harvesting my database?

[cgchris99]

I have some new competition for my website. A company has started a website that is very similar to mine. I list a database of events. I have thousands listed.

The company in question wanted my database which I declined to give it to them. Now how do I keep them from harvesting my database and putting it on theirs?

Is there a way to check for a large number of hits or pages from a single IP?

The users of the site may hit 10-20 pages but if it went over 100, I would be thinking a harvesting program.

Any ideas?

Thanks

[drawmack]

$_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'] will give you the accessing IP. Then what you can do is store the acces time and the IP address in the database. If the count of this goes over a certain amount in a given time period then flag them as a hervester.