I can&#x27;t imagine a way that&#x27;s even figuratively true. The crime of burglary is about being somewhere that you&#x27;re not supposed to; perhaps you meant to say it&#x27;s like <i>larceny</i> of the public. But even then, it&#x27;s a very tenuous connection you&#x27;re trying to draw.<p>These companies were not taking anything away from the public; they made the effort to digitize, process, and catalog documents, which is no small task. And they set up servers to host these documents and make them searchable. If you feel they&#x27;re asking too much money for these efforts, you&#x27;re welcome to simply pretend they don&#x27;t exist, and replicate their work yourself. They did nothing to make that task harder.<p>Now, if the companies <i>destroyed</i> the original public records or otherwise placed new locks around them that hadn&#x27;t existed beforehand, then yes, your metaphor, while still hand-wavy, would at least hold water. But of course nothing like that actually happened here.