Is web scraping against terms of service?

Is web scraping job postings legal?

I am new to the internet and the legal part of it.

I have been doing some research on web scraping sites for a while. They seem like they are legal, but I would like to know where I can find reputable information.

Is it OK if I read a company's job postings from their website, which is not protected by copyright or a privacy policy, and post them to my website? Would that be considered copyright infringement or something like that? Thanks for the help. I do appreciate it! Posted by Anonymous on 1/7/2016 4:20 PM (view original):Is it OK if I read a company's job postings from their website, which is not protected by copyright or a privacy policy, and post them to my website? Yes, that's absolutely fine. All you're doing is making static copies of the web pages that others have provided for free. You're not creating anything.

You are assuming that because "you are not creating anything" does not mean it's okay to take copyrighted material and repost it elsewhere. Copyright law requires attribution or some form of disclaimer that the creator of the material did not author the work in question. While web scraping would be ok, I don't think you should use the information since you didn't attribute the source.

That's a pretty broad statement. You might use the information because it's not in violation of copyright (per the definition above). You may even use it out of courtesy to the source. No need to lie about it or otherwise misrepresent it.

Is it legal to sell web scraped data?

In the EU you cannot 'steal' the design of a website and then sell it.

In the US we can say you can do whatever you want as long as it doesn't impact your competitors. Are people selling web scraped data legal?

It depends on the legal jurisdiction. For example, in Germany you are allowed to scrape web content to your own purpose, but you're not allowed to use it to create new services. In France, however, you are allowed to do anything with your website. In the US there is a big difference, it can vary from state to state.

Where I live, for instance, you can only sell the raw data. The design of the website has to stay in the hands of the website owners.

It also depends on what kind of data you're collecting. There are lots of legal things you can and cannot do.

How do web scraping sites make money? I believe these guys only scrape the web content. They don't add or manipulate data at all. What they sell is simply the content of the pages they collect. This is probably the safest and best legal way of doing it because you're just providing data that was already on a website.

Are there ways to make money legally selling web scraped data? Yes, I believe so. There are several kinds of online scrapers out there that do offer their service. It may even be possible to monetize your website with the help of an online scraper, especially if it adds value to your existing website. If you really want to know how you can make money from web scraped data, I suggest reading this article:

Have you ever scraped web content from a website before? Is it safe? I do it for my own purpose all the time without paying attention to the consequences. I think it's safe when you only scrape the data which is available on any webpage. For example, if someone owns a website in France, they could sue you if you copy their webpages. This is because you're technically using their goodwill, which is considered property.

Is web scraping against terms of service?

I have to extract data from several websites for a project that doesn't seem to have a business model beyond hey, maybe it's useful?

It's free! So I've been trying to figure out whether this violates any terms of service and so forth. All these scrapers seem to scrape data that the website owner can legally give away for free, because it's being provided by a bot (which it isn't on the site), or it's an automated image-captioning system.

To your typical website owner, a scraping program is doing what any program would be doing: trying to parse your HTML into a usable format. This is a legal no-no as far as most of them are concerned. But if you're looking at it in a legal context you might say that all programs that read data from the website that you own might technically be done in a process similar to that employed by the human reader. The site owners aren't necessarily making a profit off of what the computer is trying to make off of their site; the only other place they can see the numbers associated with a page is in analytic tool.

For example, in this article about Wikipedia, Mike wrote, As for data harvesting, we used a simple Perl script which grabbed every wikipedia page (or other data) from the front page (and from various wikipedias). If that little piece of programming were to become the subject of an intellectual property dispute, then the person(s) asserting infringement could be liable for direct liability under DMCA provisions for circumvention of copy protection.

This is why we try to look at this sort of thing through the eyes of the website's owner/administrator. Are they angry because they think their customers expect them to actually provide the information themselves, and instead they sell the service of providing information without any sort of profit model? Are they angry because they think the scraping is unfair because they are trying to make the website more interesting and engaging? There's no easy answer, and unfortunately that also means that it's hard to know what to recommend a new startup to do.