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Ask HN: Would this be legal?

2 points by askQuestion ↗ HN
suppose I have a chrome extension that allows anyone to monitor any website for new items, and when a new link appears, it opens a new tab to display the contents of the link. After the extension displays the contents of the link, it sends the html to my app, and my app processes it in some way and sends it back to the user in an email or something.

I imagine a site like Hacker News would have no problem with this. But if you take a site like Craig's List (canonical example) which has a litigious history, I could see them potentially having a problem. However, in this case I am not interacting with Craig's List in any way I am simply doing some processing on some text that is being sent to me.

EDIT: what does craigslist mean by "software expressly licensed by us" does this mean I can send them an email and get them to okay my software if its not something that is competitive with craigslist?

3 comments

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askQuestion
TOU: USE. You agree not to use or provide software (except for general purpose web browsers and email clients, or software expressly licensed by us) or services that interact or interoperate with CL, e.g. for downloading, uploading, posting, flagging, emailing, search, or mobile use. Robots, spiders, scripts, scrapers, crawlers, etc. are prohibited, as are misleading, unsolicited, unlawful, and/or spam postings/email. You agree not to collect users' personal and/or contact information ("PI").

However, in this case the software does not interoperate with CL in particular, it interoperates with all websites in general.

strollingpast
Regardless, it still interacts with CL in an autonomous way, right? Like a robot or crawler?
askQuestion
well, it interacts with ALL websites the same, it attempts to identify a list of items, and makes an http request once for each item that comes up, and it does it client side where the chrome extension is installed.

So I suppose its at least sort of autonomous.