Is web scraping legal for research?

Is web scraping legal and ethical?

This is a question that comes up a lot on forums, and I see people giving their opinions on both sides. For the sake of this article, let's just say I'm going to assume it's legal.

In general, I think it's definitely unethical to scrape websites with the intention of making money off of them. Even if you're scraping information you need for a personal project, there's no reason to make money off of the website you're scraping. You might be able to make money selling the information you scrape, but that's entirely different. If I found a good recipe for gluten-free bread, I wouldn't be justified in selling the recipe and making money off of it. I'd just use the recipe to make myself some tasty gluten-free bread.

On the other hand, there are many websites where scraping is actually the only way to access the information you need. Many academic websites have a paywall, and even if they don't, scraping is often the only way to access some of the information you need.

If you're scraping academic websites, you're probably okay. They have a public facing website with open access to their content. It's usually easy to tell whether a website is open or pay-walled. I'd also recommend contacting the website owner before scraping to ensure they aren't going to be upset with you. If they're upset, maybe they're not the best website to scrap.

On the other hand, if you're scraping websites to make money, that's definitely a problem. Even if you're scraping non-profit websites, if you're making money from their content, they have every right to sue you.

On the other hand, if you're scraping to make a personal website, or your own blog, then it's completely fine. It's only a problem if you're scraping for profit.

This is actually a great point in that it's not so cut and dry. I think the best way to do it is to follow some general rules and guidelines.

Know your audience. The first thing you should think about is your audience.

Is it OK to scrape websites?

Scraping websites is common practice, however the legality surrounding webscraping varies. Some webmasters may be concerned about using their website as a data source, other people seem to prefer that you use their data because they can make money on it. Either way it seems unlikely that you will find a clear answer on whether or not you are legally allowed to do this. My personal opinion is that it's OK to scrape websites if you don't modify any text. However if you intend to modify the code in the website, you might have problems. Here's a quote from the author of ScraperWiki - who wrote a wiki page called '?'

Is it OK to scrape websites? Scraping on large websites isn't easy (although it's less difficult than it sounds), but if you have basic coding skills, there are ways to get around it (and to avoid getting banned by the website owner! As far as legalities go though, it's pretty much an open book. So to answer the question If your intention is not to modify code on the website, scrape away! (I will add that you shouldn't attempt to scrape commercial sites that are in any way associated with gambling etc. For obvious reasons) If you do want to modify the website or any content you are likely to run into problems though I'll go into that more in a minute.

Note: Please don't send us any hate mail over this - no-one's going to be sent to prison (and that includes me! We just want to make the Internet a bit better, but first we need to know exactly what the legal status is - we're no lawyers here. Legal Issues. Scraping is generally quite common, so the legal issues arise where website owners are being paid by people organisations that do intend to change any data on their website (ie companies). What constitutes change is a subjective matter, so a simple answer won't be available. The question that needs asking is; do people have a right to be paid if they modify my website and I can't? Many would say yes, but there is no definitive answer.

Is web scraping legal for research?

I'm a graduate student working on a class that utilizes web scraping to find information. We scrape public information from websites such as www.whitehouse.gov, www.nytimes.com, and www.wikipedia.org. We use PHP, HTML, and CSS, and I am the only developer on this project.

Can we legally scrape any of these sites for our project? The website you are scraping is completely within their bounds. If anything, they may claim that you are using their content or linking to them without permission, which would not be legal. The legality of data mining is much more relevant. There are several kinds, including commercial data mining where there are companies paying someone to crawl specific websites for them.

If your project does not fall in to one of these categories it should be fine.