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Ask HN: Is Web Scraping Illegal?

1 points by mohitc ↗ HN
Is web-scraping illegal? Does this also vary from country to country?

To be more specific: If I extract data from a website to be displayed in my App/Website, data which is publicly available and not extracted from a login or a workflow... is that a problem?

5 comments

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forgotmypw17
I am not a laywer, and this is not legal advice.

There was a high-profile case, brought by LinkedIn, and it was ruled against them, setting precedent, at least in the U.S., that scraping is allowed.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/09/victory-ruling-hiq-v-l...

greenyoda
While it may not be illegal to scrape a web site, it's also not illegal for that site to detect that you're scraping them and limit your ability to do so (for example, by blocking your IP address). So I wouldn't recommend building a business on such a shaky foundation.

Also, republishing copyrighted content is illegal, so it's important to be careful about what is scraped and republished. While facts themselves may not be copyrightable, a presentation of them in a particular form may be.

pimterry
If you're scraping personal data - e.g. people's names, email addresses, employment info or similar - then you probably fall under GDPR here, unless you can somehow exclude all EU users from scraping entirely. Companies have been fined for this, e.g. Poland fined a small marketing firm £200,000 for scraping in 2019: https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/30/covert-data-scraping-on-wa...
mohitc
I am scraping links to news articles from another search-engine kind of publisher of news. And will link it to original news article website links only on my website
argimenes
Scraping data shouldn't be any more illegal than reading; but publishing that data without consent may or may not be legal.