Is it ethical to web scrape a website?

Can you get IP banned for web scraping?

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Within the Techs/Web forums, part of the Techsite Network. See it here For example in your case: Now if you visit their websites by crawling that website you will get a . Not to mention that as a web developer it doesn't matter how many domains you have (or where they are located in all likelihood, but in my experience they know exactly what IPs you are in when you scrape them), however it can and will get you and your team banned for one simple thing . You can not scrape them at will no matter how hard you try and if you do you risk getting yourself and your company in the same trouble or possibly even worse, as with some companies the site admins are the ones that do the blacklisting rather than the actual IP address (and with that, the ISP's that give the ban notices) you know what I mean? Now it is much easier to make the site completely private and you can't get through it (which in my opinion is still an option anyway), you just need to make some efforts to ensure that you never use automated scripts to access it again, unless you want a very long notice from you ISP. I know you can't use those things but I don't believe that it's necessary to tell you exactly what to do, because your ISP can easily find out what you've done to get yourself there;-)
A valid point, but I've been doing this for years and never once had any problems. However, it does tend to become more work when there's a lot of different sites involved. The whole web scraper project I did a while back was over 1000 pages deep, so were spending a lot of time dealing with those IP blocks before we even had anything working. In our case the sites were actually under other ISPs that weren't paying for, so we could bypass them completely and still be fine, but still having to deal with those ISPs and their blocking systems.

Is it ethical to web scrape a website?

Let me state clearly at the beginning of my question: I don't advocate web scraping.

If I did, everyone would have done it in one way or another - so I'm not claiming to know what the ethics of web scraping are (or whether I might have done it myself).

I'm really trying to understand the nuances of web scraping from a developer/company perspective. Is it ethical to scrape a website and serve it to your users? What about if the intent is not scraping but rather just to display content that you want to put out on your website? Here's a small use-case example: I am building a site that will have channels. One channel is dedicated to videos and the other to pictures. When someone visits one of the channels, he gets all videos/pictures (but NOT any meta data about the videos/pictures) displayed in a webpage. The pages do not contain unique identifiers for each video/picture (a random, user generated URL). They're just plain, basic html tables and images that contain URLs for the videos/pictures.

As far as web scraping goes, one could grab the table with the video URLs into a database in a way that is legal for many websites (say an iFrame to load the url of a video). If the user gets the url of a picture, do we feel that we had invaded someones privacy? The reason that I ask this question is because I run my own DNS provider and am starting to offer hosted web applications. My understanding is that my customers should be able to host websites using the content provided by content providers but not use web scraping techniques to provide content. Or am I doing something wrong here?

The issue here is that you are serving content based on someone else's data - specifically some data created by the owner of the site that you are scrapping. As such you are entering into a grey area for yourself and your business model. You can't make the blanket assumption that content that you have added in is safe, it is not. Any scraping of their site and use of this data represents an action on their part for which they have every right to be mad, no matter how trivial or insignificant your use may be.

What are the rules for web scraping?

If you go out to the movies and see that there's only 1 or 2 seats available, you are usually allowed to take them.

In most cases, this is considered to be stealing because it's technically not legal. However, when we talk about web scraping, things get more complex. Is it still stealing if I go to a website like Craigslist and I see a number of items that are available for purchase, and click on the link to buy it? What about when I use software to download the html page from Google or Amazon. Do I have to pay extra taxes? Can I just make sure that it's my girlfriend in the video? How do I actually pay for it? Do I have to buy tickets for myself and her? Do I have to watch the movies as her?

Is it stealing if I go to a website like Craigslist and I see a number of items that are available for purchase, and click on the link to buy it? First of all, let's remember that there are 4 basic requirements to qualify for the word stealing. These are: 1) It can be a person rather than animal (like a dog who stole the cookie that you ate). 2) It doesn't have to involve a physical act (if you copy an object you can be charged with theft but you can't be charged for downloading music from iTunes.) 3) It involves an unauthorized use. 4) It causes harm to someone else (for example in the case of credit card fraud, the harm is a financial one.) Web scraping requires none of these. We can do web scraping in three different ways: 1) By copying information from a page. 2) By copying information from a page and also creating data on your own (which is generally what I recommend, and which will allow you to legally buy something through your website.) 3) By making calls or sending emails to websites, and copying information and building data from websites. You will want to choose whichever one suits you best.

To do web scraping, you need to have the permissions of the website owner. That means your access will be based on whatever their terms of use are (either permission-based or I'll share everything with you if you share back, which will work fine but isn't that fun?