Who buys scraped data?

Is data scraping legal in the US?

The topic of scraping is not often heard in the US, so it was interesting to learn that there was a lawsuit against ScraperWiki.

It appears that the only real difference is that ScraperWiki.com does not offer any search functionality, but their "ticker" on the homepage looks the same as on Yahoo! Finance. While this may be annoyance for the site owner, scraping is legal.

According to the Wikipedia article on scraping, "scraping for personal or other commercial purposes does not in itself infringe copyright or other intellectual property rights (it is not an infringement) as long as the copyright and/or other intellectual property right holder consents to the use." However, the case against ScraperWiki.com was still dismissed and it is unknown if anyone else has been taken to court.

The question is, even if there is no risk in scraping, is it legal? I'd say no. Copyright exists precisely to prevent others from taking things without being paid. As we have already stated, scraping is not illegal. But it's always worth being wary, as you never know when your copyright may become something that others find less agreeable.

But what if you only scrape things that you want published openly on the web. I don't mean using the API and adding my changes, but I mean the raw data files.

In that case, the data would be covered by Fair Use, and I could argue that such data is freely available, and it is only through scraping that those results are made generally available to the public. In fact, the most common copyright violation occurs when you download copyrighted content without purchasing the right to do so.

What to do with scraped data?

Scrapy will process this file and write the results to a file called example.

Py - this file gets saved as a file called example.pyc, which is an archive. You can open this archive with a text editor (eg Sublime or TextWrangler) to find the data in the file. It should be fairly obvious what to do with the data. Some text editors don't support text editing, so you will have to get another editor (like Notepad). This file can now be sent to the database.

If you want to use scrapy's built-in item loader (or any other Python item loader) it's possible to tell the item loader to open the file with a text editor first and save the output into a different file. Just use an extension like .pyw, .txt, .plw or whatever text file format works for your environment.

You can also read the item output from the file into a string using something like the following: output = StringIO.StringIO() itemloader.processitem(item, output) I would recommend the second option as it gives you a lot more flexibility with text editors.

Can you get sued for scraping data?

Yes, it is legal.

It's not an infringement of copyright or anything else, because it's a public, educational use. You're not using the data for any commercial purpose (no ads, no products, no selling, no nothing), so there is no violation.

The important question is: are you doing it for a commercial purpose? If you're not, then you don't have to worry about it. If you are, then it could get you into trouble.

You don't even need to worry about a lawsuit. In my opinion, it's unlikely that anyone would go after you for doing this, but it is possible. I think the likelihood is that you'd get a warning letter, and if it's a big enough site, they might send a couple of lawyers after you.

I say this because I've read a lot of lawsuits brought by companies against people for "stealing" their data. In all those cases, it was an infringement of copyright, not a violation of the Fair Use Doctrine.

In fact, I suspect most sites out there will tell you to stop scraping their site before you get sued. They know you won't win, but they also know that they're not going to get in trouble for it.

Who buys scraped data?

- rvladofilho
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I would like to know ? I think the more accurate is not. Know. For example, I use a scraper to get information from the web and save it as csv files (that can be imported by Excel and opened in another program). Do you agree with me? mmanfrin. The companies selling such things are often not very open, because it's a big. Black hole and they do not want an "outsider" to find out how much data they. Actually buy (or sell!) through such services. If you are looking for data on some large company, that is fairly easy and they will just provide you what. They see fit (which could be everything ). Otherwise, it is mostly a case of selling off what we know/sell for scrap; noone wants to share anything unless. They have an interest in it.