Which software is best for web scraping?

Is web scraping AI legal?

Last month, a company called ParlAI announced a new technology that it says can scrape the contents of websites and turn them into text documents.

The firm's stated purpose is to build a service that helps people write better content for their blogs, but it also claims to be able to generate legal documents for use in court.

The project's creator, John Minton, told Motherboard that the use of AI to automate content generation in court has nothing to do with how the technology would be used at ParlAI, but some attorneys are concerned that it could be used to create content that is so perfect that no one would dare to challenge it. There's been a lot of discussion about whether or not AI could be used to automate legal work, and much of it focuses on whether such tools could be used to assist lawyers in writing briefs and other documents. For example, a New York Times article by John Markoff in 2026 described a company called BAML that is developing an AI program that could be used to automate the creation of corporate documents.

But as Minton points out, there's a much larger concern when it comes to AI that could be used to automate legal writing: namely, whether the end result of such a process is something that could actually be used in a court of law. There's currently no federal law that specifically prohibits the use of AI for legal writing, but there are plenty of laws that prohibit certain uses of automation. According to Minton, the most relevant federal law, 18 U.S.C. 1030, criminalizes the unauthorized access of a protected computer without authorization. The language of this law, which was created in 1996 and hasn't been significantly amended since, is broad enough to cover the use of AI-based programs for legal writing.

In a 2026 article published in the Cornell Law Review, Christopher Zappone and Adam Schwartz argue that this federal law could be applied to the use of automated legal writing. Their analysis, which focused on the use of AI to automate document creation, was based on several pieces of evidence that they presented.

First, they noted that section 1030 includes protected computers and does not specify that these computers need to be connected to the Internet.

Is ParseHub really free?

Is there some catch?

Free Software Developer Conference

When Google announced ParseHub a couple of months ago, I immediately thought of how this would be used at the event of my Free Software conference in London, FSF UK. I would be running a very small ParseHub node to allow users to access it through their free Parse applications and allow them to read/list etc their data. Unfortunately for Google, the FSF have since bought our own Parse hosting that we use ourselves. That being said, they are also using Parse as well, so you get your daily fix of cloud services from Google.

Before I get to the event itself, let's take a moment to think about all this free stuff that Google offers and how we could leverage it for work. In one breath, here is what we want to accomplish with ParseHub: Allow users to access their Parse data (which is hosted on Google's servers) with their Free software, so they can easily read/list/manage their data. This is for users like students, academics, researchers or maybe even teachers. All these users already have free software licenses, which allows them to freely download ParseHub, which will hopefully improve the speed with which they access their data.

To try the ParseHub service, sign up for a free account at and add yourself to your accounts. You may then try out the ParseHub platform by uploading some data into your Parse applications. To access the hosted Parse data, users will need to authenticate with their existing Parse apps and allow them to upload files with OAuth. To learn more about the features of ParseHub, here is an example video from Google about ParseHub:

After adding yourself, I had a list of projects that I uploaded. Each project lists the name, description, website and files uploaded into the application. The apps were fairly easy to upload and you don't need to use Google's tools, which is great!

The ParseHub site is pretty fast loading, as it uses web sockets. When we added the free application to my accounts, it asked me a bunch of permission questions which I accepted as they have been set up by Google themselves. So we had no worries about logging in and creating databases.