Is it legal to scrape data from Instagram?

Is scraping legal in the USA?

I am a non-US citizen.

Will the US legal system let me scrape information from any website for the purpose of publishing the information? As in, I can scrape a lot of links and publish them on my blog, can I get into legal trouble? IANAL, but here's what I think: Your scraping activities are not illegal. You can copy content from web pages, but you may be violating copyrights. However, you might violate some other laws that apply to business operations.

One thing to watch out for is scraping personal pages. This could be construed as a violation of privacy laws.

This article should help you navigate that minefield. In the USA it will only be illegal if you have permission to obtain information legally and you are illegally obtaining it. This means that if you are using an API that you pay for this may not be illegal.

That being said scraping is generally frowned upon these days, even with permission. It's a good idea to make sure that your site doesn't violate the terms of service of the website being scraped.

Is it legal to scrape data from Instagram?

I have a friend who needs to scrape data from Instagram.

He's a freelance writer, and his website is currently completely unsupported by data, so he has to go through all the trouble of manually adding new information to it.

The website is going to have about 6 pages of data. He says that scraping Instagram is legal. I'd like to know if this is true, or if I should be worried about being sued. I was under the impression that scraping data was only legal when done by a non-profit organization.

Here's an example of what he wants to do. He wants to put together a list of profiles with interesting content on Instagram, and then let his readers download this data. IANAL but: You're probably right that scraping would not fall under the 'non-profit' clause in the first sentence, but I wouldn't be comfortable saying that your friend is legally OK to do it without reading the fine print. To do a bit more digging into the legality of scraping, here's an article from the Guardian that discusses this and how it differs from regular web scraping. It seems to be legal, but you still need to be careful.

Also, I'd strongly recommend using something like a service like Instaparse which allows you to grab data and display it without having to manually enter it all yourself. I'm not sure if it's possible to scrape in a way that can be automated by the user, but if that's your friend's intention I'd suggest looking into this kind of tool.

Can you get banned for scraping?

If I scrape the page that will show when I click on the link, it will say I have been banned.

I am planning to only grab what I want from this page rather than use JS. Is there anyway to get around this?

Yeah you can get banned depending on what you're doing with the content if they figure out what you did but it's not a straight forward process and often the reason you're getting banned is just a coincidence so the answer is it's hard to say. You may be blocked by the person clicking the link who has the rights to actually the content you grabbed but if not then chances are that you're just doing it in a way that is illegal for various reasons.

What he meant was, it could be a web site owner or someone else has the copyright of the information that you are scrapping from, and you are violating their copyright. That is why your ISP and/or the hosting company won't let you take anything of theirs. They don't allow to do that.

Yes. There are more than just a few of those cases. And a couple years back they were even getting shut down for people running warez sites at home.

When I got my first computer I used the internet a little bit. Eventually I would hear of warez groups because of various reasons. Eventually, I had a warez friend who found a way to download porn from China without any hassle of being black listed in China and warez sites were able to still distribute content without the fear of getting blacklisted in China.

Then again, the internet was much less developed back then and a guy doing what he did would end up doing a ton of research in order to even get a server set up. Now, a man in the US can get a server up in an hour and I wouldn't be surprised if the same can be done in 3-5 minutes these days.

It can happen over anything really. The internet itself is a perfect breeding ground for such things. From just doing illegal downloads to a botnet.