Ask HN: Is scraping webpages for research purposes considered legal

1 points by fantasticwaddle ↗ HN

3 comments

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Depends on a country. And in practice on how much money the people behind the website can throw at the lawyers when annoyed.

For the US you may want to read about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz

Also depends on the ToS of each page, and their robots.txt should allow or disallow crawling
If it matters pay a lawyer for a legal opinion. If it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter. Good luck.