Re: Legality of scraping a web site?
Re: Legality of scraping a web site?
- Subject: Re: Legality of scraping a web site?
- From: Jeff LaMarche <email@hidden>
- Date: Mon, 9 Feb 2004 10:03:11 -0500
On Feb 9, 2004, at 9:43 AM, Li'l D wrote:
It varies from one website to another. Look at Google's TOS for
instance, they prohibit "performing 'offline' searches on Google." See
this news article re the consequences of disregarding Google's TOS:
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-883558.html
But I believe there are other search services that aren't as strict as
Google and can be legally scraped.
And it's also an open legal question whether you can be bound by a
unilateral TOS such as Google's, especially since you can utilize their
service from their main page without ever even knowing they have a TOS.
If you aren't bound by the TOS, many forms of screen scraping are
allowable under fair-use, at least under current U.S. laws - don't know
much about other places.
A lot of it is going to depend on what you're doing and your intent. If
you set up a script to allow your grandma to cache the results of her
knitting search, they're a lot less likely to go after you than if you
sell a product or service that seeks to profit by using the output of
another site.
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