Is web scraping legal in US?

This is a hard question to answer, as there is no "law" governing web scraping. That said, I believe that web scraping is legal in the U.S. As long as you comply with the terms of service of the website you are scraping.

I will explain each component of this statement: Web scraping is not illegal (though there are some very specific laws which can make it illegal). If you are scraping a site which allows you to do so, then it is legal. If you are scraping a site which does not allow you to do so, then you are breaking the law. If you are scraping a site which does not have any terms of service which allow you to do so, then you are breaking the law. If you are scraping a site which has no terms of service which allow you to do so, then you are breaking the law. So, what are the terms of service? The terms of service is basically a legal document that your web server needs to comply with in order to function. This is a contract between your server and the server which hosts the page you are scraping.

What are the most common terms of service you'll see for websites? 1) You are allowed to scrape the content of the page. 2) You may be able to scrape some data on the page, but you are not allowed to scrape data that would reveal the identities of users. 3) You are not allowed to store any information on your own servers for more than 10 days. 4) You are not allowed to share the scraped data. If the terms of service are not clear or you want to be sure that you are complying with them, you can always contact the website owner. They may have a legal department who can help you with the terms. However, it is often easier to just comply with the terms and get on with it.

You can't get into legal trouble for scraping a site. If a site allows scraping, then you are not violating the TOS.

There are several issues at play here. First, if the site allows you to scrape their content, then you are not violating their terms of service. Second, if they don't allow you to scrape, and you don't want to contact them to ask permission, then you are violating their TOS.

Which websites allow web scraping?

How do they work?

This is a discussion on What websites are there for web scraping? within the Python Programming forums, part of the General Programming Boards category; I have a project where I want to scrape data off of websites. But the problem is .

I have a project where I want to scrape data off of websites. But the problem is that every website has a different format and I have no idea how to scrape this data. I can't seem to find a really good example of how to scrape something like this.

Thanks! EDIT: What I want to do is search for a particular type of car, get the make, model, and year and write the data into a .txt file. I already know that the data is in a table. If anyone could provide an example that would be great!

You're probably going to have to write your own parser, the site may be using some form of xpath to select the elements, as in for "make" and a for "model", then you could write something like: Code: driver = webdriver.Chrome() driver.get("") driver.text If you use a text-based browser, you'd be looking for what kind of text-based interface the site presents to users. Does it have any fields, or is it just a table with the rows filled in by the user? If there's no way to figure that out, then it's going to be a little bit trickier to parse.

The first time that I was writing a crawler, I would go for each row and extract the information. Now, I try to use the HTML structure to help the automation process. For instance, I would want to check the "make" or "model" field for the row in question.

Can I get in trouble for web scraping?

That was a lot easier than my first thought.

There's no doubt you can get in trouble for web scraping. But just because there are laws against the practice doesn't mean they're always enforced. There is a website called 'Freedom of Speech' that talks about this and says it isn't illegal unless you're using it in a commercial way, or it interferes with your rights to copyright or trademark.

If you're thinking about using this on your own blog for education, to demonstrate the lack of transparency between manufacturers and their data sources, why would you have to worry about getting in trouble? And if you were caught, what would be the punishment? If you did this just for "fun", would you get into any trouble at all? If you want to look for legal information regarding web scraping, this is a good link -. Also if you get caught by your employer or another organisation - remember the penalties you can get are very stiff - up to 3 years. That'd suck to have to go through that. Just make sure you have clear permission.

Just remember in the eyes of some people, just because something isn't illegal, it doesn't make it right or OK. There's many places to say there are rules on the web. For example, when I was looking for more about legal terms to use with databases, I found this great place - They do a lot of educational resources for various topics. You may want to have a look around before you just dive in.

When you say the reason you would want to scrape a web page is to improve your skills, there are things other than scraping sites to learn about. It might be something like learning to speak foreign languages. There are websites out there that teach the fundamentals for you, and don't require you to visit and see it in action. For example, Just doing some basic tasks, such as copying phrases from real life situations and translating them in Spanish, and even then using it to check you're getting it correct. It's not cheating.

There are things I'd try first if I really wanted to know for sure; just like learning English.

Is web scraping for personal use legal?

I've used web scraping for a couple of small things, and as a result made some money off it. It's usually in the form of Amazon or eBay affiliate commissions, but it might have been my etsy store commissions (I am also selling some stuff, even though I would rather just be selling the code). I have never done anything too large scale or taken a huge amount of traffic from the same site, but that doesn't stop me from wondering: Is it legal?

I understand that scraping a webpage is not explicitly illegal, but if the website owner doesn't like the fact you are scraping their site what do you do? I imagine most people who've seen your blog would agree with a website owner that they don't want their website or data being scraped for personal use - after all isn't that what they bought themselves from someone for free! So I'm curious to know where people feel web scraping falls along the legal spectrum? Does it come down to just making it really easy for yourself, if that website owner wants to stop you, is it illegal? How does the amount of traffic I'm pulling affect this? Is there a specific category I fall under? It seems there's quite a lot of grey area surrounding web scraping. Here's an example of what I'm talking about - the page is basically just displaying how much stock each product has in eBay (with images). I made this quick screen capture so you can see what I'm talking about.

What do you think? Is web scraping legal? And even if it is legal, is it ethical? Update (10th May): Someone mentioned the Google Adsense plugin - do we think this is any different? I've also read this post which gives some ideas on legality. It seems to be very grey area. However, it might help you to understand how web scraping would likely be viewed.

Update (11th May): So I thought I'd make a poll and get people's views on the legality of web scraping. Please vote in the poll and comment below with your thoughts. The poll closes on 12th May (at which point we'll have data to analyse!