Legal Conflicts with Data Scraping?

[whoami 26]

I just received an email about the Ubot 5 and the new scraping features.

I have programmed several scrapers that I am offering as freebies and also selling them.

I am very afraid that I am affecting Social Networks (Like TweetAdder case).

 

I researched and found on Wikipedia

 

 

 

Southwest Airlines has also challenged screen-scraping practices, and has involved both FareChase and another firm, Outtask, in a legal claim. Southwest Airlines charged that the screen-scraping is Illegal since it is an example of "Computer Fraud and Abuse" and has led to "Damage and Loss" and "Unauthorized Access" of Southwest's site. It also constitutes "Interference with Business Relations", "Trespass", and "Harmful Access by Computer". They also claimed that screen-scraping constitutes what is legally known as "Misappropriation and Unjust Enrichment", as well as being a breach of the web site's user agreement. Outtask denied all these claims, claiming that the prevailing law in this case should be US Copyright law, and that under copyright, the pieces of information being scraped would not be subject to copyright protection. Although the cases were never resolved in the Supreme Court of the United States, FareChase was eventually shuttered by parent company Yahoo!, and Outtask was purchased by travel expense company Concur.^[10]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_scraping#Legal_issues

 

 

 

 

 

What do you think?

[Ptrick125 45]

As long as you don't misuse the information you are scraping, you are fine. These lawsuits took place with decent sized companies, not just some guy with Ubot Studio making a chart.

[whoami 26]

As long as you don't misuse the information you are scraping, you are fine. These lawsuits took place with decent sized companies, not just some guy with Ubot Studio making a chart.

 

I see..

But when it comes to PHP and MySQL Screen Scraping?

[Code Docta (Nick C.) 638]

As long as you don't manipulate the information, man. Like, there are way to put in Ubot then change the info to look like something else. Like faking screen shots of your affiliate earnings and showing really low air fairs. Like fly to Hawaii for $10 for whatever reason, stuff like that.

 

We typically use it for gathering info and that is fine. I'm not a lawyer and this is not legal advice, just my opinion.

 

Every search engine would be sued for this, so I think your good.

[UBotDev 276]

Actually most of the larger sites has its own "terms of service" and they specify there what you can do and what you can't.

 

For example Twitter allows scraping for sites that are not disallowed by robots.txt: https://twitter.com/tos

 

Craigslist.org for example doesn't allow you to copy, aggregate, display, distribute their content: http://www.craigslist.org/about/terms.of.use

 

...

 

So you should check every individual site to determine if you apply with their rules, else you could get into legal conflict.

[Seth Turin 223]

Disclaimer: Nothing I say should be considered legal advice and you should seek qualified legal counsel before doing anything you're unsure of. What I say is only my personal opinion.

 

To me, this just sounds like typical overreach of big business. If you're not selling copyrighted information as your own, then what business is it of any what you do with information that was made publicly available? Still, I agree with UBotDev that it's probably a good idea to read the TOS.

[kev123 132]

This is just my thoughts and shouldnt be seen as fact. Ill use a example of supermarket prices. If you build a bot that scrapes the best prices for a product and displays the results I very much doubt you would run into issues. If you have a website that constantly scrapes 10 supermarkets full website and displays there results against your own products against your cheaper. Then you may run into issues. Companys are much more likely to sue other large companys if they think there loosing money. Apart from twitter they just hate everyone

[AutomationNinja 194]

If it is online then it isn't private so in my opinion it is fair game.

[Pete 121]

Guys I would forget the TOS as none are worth a damn now days as all of them contain bla bla bla change these terms at any time. This is a legal mine field where the outcome will depend on

1, you having very deep pockets

2, where in the world you are living

3, where in the world you host/use this content

There is no cut and dry answer

[Code Docta (Nick C.) 638]

They would have to make you agree with your "real" name to the TOS be for you even have access to the site for it to matter. If you are logged in under your real name then it applies to you. Other than that screw them if they can't take a joke (scrape).

[whoami 26]

Thanks everyone. 

I will come back to this thread if I find some useful info about ToS on Scraping. 

Scraping is very powerful and could be very legit like kev123 said.

But also can be very harmful in the wrong hands.