There are many examples of legal uses of web scraping - such as travel aggregation websites that pull booking data from other travel websites to optimize the pricing on their own website.

As long as you are scraping public data - that is still considered legal (though against most website’s Terms of Use).

Also there are web data providers that collect data from eCommerce market places and offer the data sets for sale to other ecommerce sellers. As long as the process has a compliance procedure and there are no intellectual property infringements then it is totally legal.

There are two main considerations for legality of web scraping:

Scraping often violates the terms of service of the target website. The terms of service of established data-heavy sites almost invariably prohibit data scraping. Violating the terms of service doesn't mean that you've done something illegal. But it does mean that the website might be able to sue you for breach of contract.

Publishing scraped content may be a breach of copyright. Depending on what the scraped content is and what you do with it, it may be a violation of the copyright holder's rights. Facts themselves are not subject to copyright in the US, but creative expression is. You may be able to rely on the fair use defense if you use only portions of someone else's creative expression in a way that adds value and is not mere regurgitation.

Hope it helps!

Using LinkedIn's API for data scraping carries significant legal and ethical implications. While LinkedIn provides an API to developers for certain approved applications, unauthorized data scraping—whether through bots, automated tools, or even manual extraction—often violates its Terms of Service and can have serious consequences. Here’s a detailed overview:

1. Violation of LinkedIn’s Terms of Service

• LinkedIn explicitly prohibits data scraping, automated extraction, and unauthorized access to its platform in its User Agreement.
• By scraping data without permission, individuals or companies risk being permanently banned from LinkedIn and could face other enforcement actions, including account suspension.

2. Breach of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA)

• In the U.S., unauthorized access to a website or database can fall under the CFAA. Scraping LinkedIn data without permission may be deemed a form of unauthorized access, especially if technical barriers (like CAPTCHA) are bypassed.
• Legal consequences under the CFAA can include fines and, in severe cases, criminal charges.

3. Intellectual Property Infringement

• LinkedIn considers its database and user-generated content intellectual property. Unauthorized scraping might infringe on LinkedIn's copyright or database rights, leading to potential lawsuits.

4. Privacy Law Violations

• Many jurisdictions have robust privacy laws (e.g., GDPR in Europe, CCPA in California) that protect personal data.
• Scraping user profiles without consent could be viewed as a violation of these laws, especially if personal data is collected and processed.

5. Legal Precedents

• In hiQ Labs vs. LinkedIn (2019), the court ruled that scraping publicly available LinkedIn data didn’t violate the CFAA because it didn’t involve circumventing technical barriers. However:The ruling applies only to publicly available data.This decision may not apply outside the U.S. or in other contexts.LinkedIn continues to appeal and actively litigates against companies engaged in scraping.

6. Ethical and Reputational Risks

• Beyond legal risks, scraping LinkedIn data without consent can damage your reputation and trust within professional networks.
• Users may perceive scraping as a breach of their privacy, impacting your brand image.

7. Approved Uses via LinkedIn’s API

• LinkedIn offers a Developer API, but access is strictly regulated. Approved use cases include:Building apps that enhance LinkedIn functionality.Integrating LinkedIn features into tools for recruiting, networking, or analytics.
• Unauthorized use of the API, or exceeding agreed-upon permissions, can still lead to legal actions.

How to Stay Compliant

• Use LinkedIn’s API responsibly and adhere to its developer agreement.
• Obtain explicit user consent before accessing or using their data.
• Focus on alternative methods for data gathering, such as publicly available reports or networking through legitimate channels.

By respecting LinkedIn's policies and applicable laws, you can avoid legal pitfalls and maintain ethical standards in your operations.

Prm4u | Promotion for social media

Edit: I could have sworn this question asked “Why” rather than “When” but it seems I was mistaken. Anyway, here’s my answer regarding “Why”.

Because things are legal by default (or should be) unless there’s a specific reason to make them illegal.

When you create a website and put it out there, you’re publishing it, you want people to see it. You want them to know the information contained there. The method that they use for doing that shouldn’t be of concern.

Forget the internet for a moment and think about card indexes that used to be used in libraries.

It must have taken whole teams of people to compile these. I assume that the basic information, the “raw data” was provided by publishers, but they must have employed teams of people to print them up in this standard format and then store them in huge cabinets.

Web scraping is a digital version of that.

Of course you have to be careful to ensure that only the data you want to be scraped can be scraped. You want strangers to know about the services you provide, the products you make, the prices you charge, your hours of business and where to find you. You don’t wan’t them to know your employees’ payroll details or home addresses.

So, if you have data that you don’t want to be scraped from your website, don’t put it on your website.

Images (c)

The process of web scraping itself is entirely legal. There's nothing to stop anyone from grabbing data from any site.

However once you have scraped data there are a number of considerations:

Does the site itself have specific restrictions?

A lot of social media sites make money by selling data. If you're sat there hoovering it up then they may be a little aggravated if they haven't given you permission or you haven't paid for the facility. This could breach their Ts&C's which might result in civil action against you.

Does the data contain personal information?

If the site(s) scraped contains data relating to an individual and you have not got informed consent from those individuals you are likely to be in breach of privacy laws (GDPR in Europe and various state level laws in the US. Similar privacy laws exist elsewhere). This is potentially more serious and depending on what your intentions are could result in criminal indictment as well as civil action by the regional data regulator.

Possible exemptions mainly revolve around scientific research but you'd still have to consider privacy issues and contact the relevant sites where possible to avoid any misunderstandings.

The other (technical) issue to consider is loading on the networks. Crawling and scraping sites can be very intensive in terms of bandwidth and server capacity. A lot of commercial sites hate random scrapers just for this reason as it interferes with legitimate site business by effectively spamming their servers with requests. For that reason some cloud data protection providers will sinkhole unauthorised scraping activity if they spot it. This saves them dealing with any resultant legal issues as well.

Like it or not - Scraping is *practically* legal.

Yes of course there are numerous rules and regulations and laws that may apply to unauthorised scraping. But who’s there to enforce the rules on Internet? Does copyright law in United States apply to websites hosted in Vietnam? Can we enforce EU regulations and apply them on sites that hosted in Canada?

I am no lawyer but we all knew the practical answers to these questions, aren’t we?

And - guess who’s the biggest scrapper on Internet? It’s Google - the almighty, billions dollar, “do-no-evil” search engine! And I am going to show you some examples.

Google scrapes content from Wikipedia and displays it on its own website. The user doesn’t have to visit Wikipedia to get the answer.

Google scrapes weather forecast from Weather.com and displays it on its own website. The user doesn’t have to visit Weather.com to get the answer.

Google scrapes lyrics from small lyrics sites and displays it on its own website. The user doesn’t have to click out of Google to get the answer.

Has any legal action taken on Google scraping (and stealing traffic) from other sites? And, is it illegal to scrape websites? The answer is obvious.

Hey,

You may do web scraping, no problem, but only for personal use. If you use it commercially, for earning money, or money’s worth, then you may have to face its consequences later.

You must read the websites’ terms and conditions well before doing this. Some websites allow you, some deny, and some even may give you an official API to do this.

At the end, everyone thinks of their own profit. So, you must disclose from where you got the information, and do a bit of marketing for them.

This way, they may allow you to scrape their website and get any type of content.

Hope that helped.

Suggestions for edits and for improving the content are most welcome!

Thanks!

As you might already know, web scraping is the process of gathering information from the internet. Web scraping helps you extract underlying HTML code and the data stored in a database. The scraper can then replicate the entire website content as and wherever needed. You can use web scraping to scrape data from websites or social media channels like YouTube and Instagram. You can even scrape data from emails. What does that mean?

What Is Email Scraping

Usually, email scraping is carried out with the help of an email parser or scraper — a program designed to extract email addresses from web pages. Such programs can usually extract email addresses from web pages and upload the results to a necessary file format, for example, Excel.

Professional scrapers usually parse data from social networks (LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.) or forums to collect email addresses from the web. A company collects the required information from these firms' corporate sites if it needs to find the email addresses of legal entities.

Is Email Scraping Legal?

If the scraped data is publicly available, then it means that the scraping process complies with the law and is considered to be legal. In short, email scraping is legit but only if you collect contacts that are available for everybody across the web.

While for scraping a website for contact details, on the other hand, you must also check the website's Terms of Use.

For almost a decade, web scraping used to be only guided by a set of related, fundamental legal theories and laws, such as:

• Copyright Infringement
• Breach of Contract
• Violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA)
• Trespass to Chattels

The law enforcement for web scraping is not clearly defined in most countries yet. But now, more and more people are realizing the need to comply with legal standards before proceeding with a scraping project so they don’t avoid falling into a tricky legal situation — all thanks to the onset of GDPR regulations. International legal circumstances vary widely, which is why you might need to follow the rules of your country.

We hope this answer helps you with your questions. If you like it, please hit the upvote button. 🎉

The brief reply to this question? No, and Yes! Scraping Amazon isn't illegal by itself. Particular conditions ascertain the legality of this action. As an exercise, of course, isn't unlawful to extract info from your site. Small-scale businesses and startups use the instrument as they can collect data cheaply and effectively without creating ventures. The vast companies rely on internet scrapers too. But they don't enjoy the reality when others utilize robots to scratch their information.

To get a scraper to become lawful, it should adhere to these rules:

• The information being scraped shouldn't be copyright protected.
• The action of data extraction shouldn't burden the Assistance of the website being scraped.
• The bot must follow the Conditions of Use of their website being scraped and never violate them.
• The scraper shouldn't collect data that violates the fundamental sense of solitude and safety like sensitive consumer info.
• The data Ought to Be expressed According to the criteria of fair use.

You may scrape:

• Product information.
• Reviews.
• Prices.
• Description.

Therefore, if you make sure you've taken all these precautionary steps, guaranteed that the scraper isn't breaking any Conditions of Service and have not caused any injury to the site by sending too many requests in a specific period, you're all set! One other important issue is that the information so pulled shouldn't be used maliciously.

That can be a significant concern for societal networking platforms, as the program of information analytics in the business is rising. Websites like Facebook and LinkedIn happen to be in the information for discovering scratching engines sifting via user profiles for information extraction. Pete Warden was threatened to be sued by Facebook when he printed the consumer information he had scraped in the social networking platform.

Most businesses engage in data scratching to collect competitor tendencies, conduct market research and perform curious analytics in their information. The intent is to find lost chances for earnings generation and profit financially. That is having been said, a great deal of large, medium and small scale organizations are investing in data scraping actions in a reasonable way. Some more are violating the rules above and so, facing legal difficulties.

Tools for scraping Amazon:

1. Scrapy
2. Octo Parse
3. Parse Hub

Dedicated proxies play an important role with these tools because Amazon will block your IP address after certain hits/threads. So in order to get better results, proxies are must.

Yes, web scraping is completely legal, be it for commercial use or for research purposes. Scraping becomes illegal only when it is used for illegal activities, like wanting to scrape a prohibited website or you are using it on a website that prohibits such services.

Other than this, you can openly use web scraping by following all the rules. If you are unsure about the process, you can use web scraping services from companies like PromptCloud.

If you have big data requirements, you can look into this. You can use the information that is publicly available, if there are following all the right practices while scraping the data.

You can check out our blogs on web crawling and web scraping, you can also explore the different services that we offer in the data service industry.

Footnote link - https://www.promptcloud.com/blog/legality-of-web-scraping-user-generated-content/

Web scraping is defined as the process of gathering information from the internet by extracting underlying HTML code and the data stored in a database. The scraper can then replicate the entire website content as and wherever needed.

1. First, you need to provide the Web Scraper with the URLs to load up before the actual process of scraping could start. As soon as it receives it, the scraper starts loading the complete HTML code for the link you have shared.
2. Moving on, the Web Scraper extracts either all the data available on the page or the specific parts of data selected by you before starting the process.
3. In the end, the Web Scraper provides you with all the data it has collected in a usable format.

API Scraping

API (Application Programming Interface), on the other hand, helps you gain access to the data of an application or operating system. In other words, an API depends on the owner of that particular dataset.

• The data can be either offered for free or be available at a cost.
• Not only this, but the owner has the power to limit the number of requests a single user can make or the amount of data they can access.

API Scraping vs. Web Scraping

With API scraping, data extraction usually takes place from one website only (unless it is some aggregator). But through web scraping, you can access and gather data from multiple websites. Moreover, API lets you obtain only a specific set of data.

• Web scraping heavily relies on proxy servers but AP scraping doesn’t.
• A web scraping tool conveniently organizes the extracted data into a structured format. But in API scraping, you will have to organize the obtained data programmatically.
• Web scraping also offers the feature of automatic storing of data through the web scraping technique, enabling the user to download the same later. You can’t do this in API scraping.
• Web scraping is much more customizable, complex, and has a set of rules while API scraping is not.

We hope this answer helps you with your questions. If you like it, please hit the upvote button. 🎉

We’re in 2018 and not yet in 2018 so I don’t know what the UK might do regarding web scraping in the coming year but in the meantime…

Web scraping is not in itself illegal in the UK and most part of the world, but the data you intend to scrape may be subject to copyright. Using it without the copyright owner's permission, especially if you are selling it, could lead to legal actions in the UK and most of the time anywhere in the world.

I don’t know the kind of data you want to scrape and how it can be edited but if it’s data that can be worked up on to appear unique you can scrape any website for data using using an anonymous web scraper like Proxy Crawl, this way you would scrape completely anonymous without being noticed, then you work on the data to make it appear unique and boom!

It’s not (at least anywhere I know of). It’s copying of content without permission which is illegal. It’s illegal whether you use a web scraper, a photcopier, or copy and paste.

It’s illegal, as otherwise people who spent a lot of time and effort creating things would not get paid for their work.

Say you wrote a book. It takes you ten years of research and writing. It was brilliant, astounding, and everyone wanted to read it. you thought that after ten years or incredible effort you might finally get paid, but…

Someone has taken 10 minutes to make a copy and post it for free. Instead of selling 250,000 copies, you sell 6. You make nothing, have to get a job in McDonalds, and never write again. The follow up book would have been even better…

Swap the book for any written content, images, games, films or music and you get the same effect.

Retailers are interested in scraping Amazon for various reasons. It has a wealth of helpful information ranging from pricing, goods, reviews, and ratings to special offers and breaking news. You can address a variety of nerve-wracking and time-consuming business issues with data collected from Amazon. It's like a chocolate factory full of all the knowledge you could ever want!

As a result, if you need to gather vast quantities of data from Amazon, you should first attempt to utilize their API. If you don't find what you're looking for there, you may start scratching around. You'll most likely want to employ web scraping services since those professionals are familiar with the challenges of dealing with massive quantities of data.

In a nutshell, you can scrape any website, which is true. If the data on a website is publicly available, you may scrape it for information. However, it is suggested that the policy be reviewed prior to scrapping. Scraping websites is not against the law as long as you adhere to the guidelines outlined below.

• Without first reading the company's Terms of Service. It should be noted that just viewing the website constitutes acceptance of the Terms of Service. This implies that if the Terms of Service prohibit any and all automated data gathering, scraping this website may be considered unlawful.
• Attempting to collect sensitive information via logins. Furthermore, it is against the law to sell scraped personal data to any other parties for monetary gain. Come on, there are lots of other methods to make money in a transparent manner!
• Copying the material that has been copyrighted. Designs, essays, movies, and anything else that is regarded to be creative labor may all be considered to be copyrighted data. Prices, on the other hand, and other comparable information are not usually considered to be protected by copyright law.
• As you can see, scraping material from websites that is publicly available and not protected by intellectual property rights is often acceptable.

The difference between using APIs and web scraping lies in the methods of data extraction, the structure and reliability of the data obtained, and the legal and ethical considerations involved.

A). APIs (Application Programming Interfaces): APIs provide a standardized way for different software systems to interact with each other. When a website offers an API, it means they've created specific access points where you can pull data in a structured format, typically JSON or XML. For those new to data extraction, services like Octoparse can offer pre-built templates to help get you started with using APIs.

#>. Advantages of APIs:

Structured Data: APIs deliver results in a well-organized and consistent format, making the data easier to understand and use.

Reliability: Unlike web scraping, APIs are officially supported by the website owner, so they're less likely to be discontinued or significantly updated unexpectedly, ensuring a stable data feed.

Rate Limiting: While APIs are convenient for developers, there are usually limitations set in the form of rate limits to prevent overloading the server.

#>. Disadvantages of APIs:

Limited Data Access: APIs might not provide access to all the information available on a website.

Rate Limits: The rate limits in place to prevent abuse can also restrict the amount of data you can download within a specific timeframe.

Access Restrictions: APIs may also have user or use case restrictions, and might require authentication.

B). Web Scraping:

Web scraping involves using a script to retrieve the HTML code of a specific webpage and then extracting the desired data from that code. This process mimics how a human user interacts with a webpage but is done automatically using scripts or tools.

#>. Advantages of Web Scraping:

Access to All Data: Web scraping allows you to access as much information as is publicly available on a website, potentially including data not offered through an API.

No Rate Limits: While scraping responsibly often involves slowing down your activity to avoid detection, it's generally not as strictly controlled as API access.

#> Disadvantages of Web Scraping:

Unstructured Data: The raw HTML code containing the data you need may require parsing and cleaning, which can be challenging and time-consuming.

Legal and Ethical Issues: Scraping can be against a website's terms of service, and if not done correctly, there can be legal consequences.

Stability Issues: Websites frequently update their layouts, which can break your scraper and require you to fix it.

It is quite complex topic. It depends of the website, the data you are scraping, what you want to do with the data and where you are based.
Webscraping is most of the time a grey area. It isn’t forbidden, but it isn’t clearly allowed.

The law of the website:
Most website have a robots.txt files to tell bot what data should not be scraped.
The one of Quora for example state that bot are not allow to index data about who you follow and who is following you.
Some website includes more human readable guidance in their terms and conditions.

What data do you plan to scrap?

Some data like personal data are protected by the law. Even if the information like my name is visible on Quora, it is against some data protection law to extract it without my consent.

Personal data protection law is a huge topic in itself. It will depends a lot about where you are located. In Europe for example GDPR will restrict you a lot.

Legality of webscraping will also depend about how you want to use the data. There is principal of fair use of data. You can for example scrape a list of Quora influencer to publish a ranking. You are basically making advertisement for those people. But you cannot scrape Quora to send personalised sales offer based on the questions people ask. Fair use is always open to interpretation, so it is never a clear cut.

In conclusion: if you want to be extra safe invest in proper legal counselling.

When it comes to scraping publicly available data using automation, the legal landscape can be quite complex and varies depending on the jurisdiction. As someone passionate about language learning and technology, I've encountered this topic in my own endeavors. Let me share some insights I've gained.

Firstly, it's essential to understand that even though data might be publicly accessible, it doesn't necessarily mean it's free to scrape without any restrictions. Many websites have terms of service that explicitly prohibit web scraping, even if the data is otherwise publicly viewable.

That said, courts have generally ruled that scraping public data is legal, as long as the scraper isn't violating any other laws in the process (like the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act in the US). A landmark case in this regard was when Microsoft scraped data from a competing website in order to build its own database. The court ruled in favor of Microsoft, stating that if the data was publicly available, then it could be scraped.

However, there are some important caveats to keep in mind. Even if the data is public, if you're using it for commercial purposes, you could run into issues with intellectual property laws. Additionally, if your scraping is putting a heavy load on the website's servers, causing damage or disruptions, that could potentially lead to legal problems as well.

One area where I've found data scraping to be particularly useful is in compiling language learning resources from various public domain or creative commons licensed sources across the web. By automating this process, I've been able to efficiently gather and organize materials to help my audience learn new languages.

Through my own research into best practices for web scraping, I came across this insightful article: PhantomBuster It provides a helpful overview of techniques and tools like Phantombuster that can be used to scrape data while minimizing potential legal risks and technical challenges. The key seems to be scraping in a responsible manner - respecting terms of service, not overloading servers, and using the data in ways that don't infringe on intellectual property rights.

In summary, while scraping publicly available data is generally legal, it's crucial to do your due diligence, understand the specific laws in your jurisdiction, and take steps to scrape data ethically and responsibly. used thoughtfully, scraping can be an invaluable tool for any online endeavor, language learning included. For a more comprehensive look at this topic, I recommend checking out the article I mentioned earlier. Happy scraping!

You'd probably be infringing on someone else’s copyrighted materials. But it’s possible that some of those images and content are actually made available to legitimate marketers of the items.

I know Sam Walton mentioned doing some of that from time to time in his book ‘Made in America’ but he was reusing the newspaper ads from other competing stores to promote the same products and those were most likely the manufacturer’s product images to start with.

And I've seen discussions on some eBay forums where one seller has taken photos from another seller to market their own products at auction. But… quite often the photos/images were from someone else in the first place. It’s kind of funny that a ‘stolen’ image is stolen again then the supposed victim complains and is called out on their complaint.

I've been working like crazy to bring in several thousand affiliate ads into a couple sites I run the last few days. That’s a lot of work but the images and text provided is from the companies I'm affiliated with and there’s no theft of content issues as those companies provide that content for their marketers.

I would say that it is not illegal at all as long as you are doing it, you own the website and "harvesting" emails. If you are using some sort of software that automatically emails users from your website then you can get into some legal trouble. Scraping e-mails (for example for a lead generation campaign) is very common in business, so I wouldn't worry about it. If the website you are scraping from is copyrighted then you could run into a problem - so make sure to read any disclaimer that might exist in the pages that you are scraping from.

I am able to scrape emails by domains and departments - I have access to 400M+ database of B2B contact details - All the email addresses found in the Domain Search have public sources on the web. The sources are always displayed in the results, along with their discovery dates.

I am also able to scrape emails on LinkedIn - I will drill down by job title, location, company name, industry, team size to get to high-quality leads and pull accurate & actionable contact data for your prospecting needs.

Whether or not it is legal to use an API in a certain way needs to be checked by reading the terms and conditions for using each API. They are very clear on what practices are not allowed when using their software tool to access their data.

That said, of the topics added here (Google Maps API , Foursquare API , etc.) to my knowledge they each specifically forbid users from scraping data and forming your own database from their proprietary information. There might be some that don’t do this, like OpenMaps, but the services listed here are very serious about being the owners of that data and only letting you do single searches, call by call. Not scraping their hard-earned work onto your own servers.

It doesn’t matter what it is you’re scraping the web for, assuming you’re not doing so for a criminal purpose. So, I’ll answer the question in the direction whether web scraping is legal or illegal.

I think it is not illegal to scrape the web be it for doing machine learning or whatever legal activity.Though a lot could come to play here, conditions such as location, target website being scraped, final purpose of scraping the web.

If your country of residence has made it illegal to scrape the web, then absolutely you’re barred from scraping the web irrespective of the terms of service of the target site. But to be candid, I’ve not read of or seen any country that made it illegal to scrape the web unless we’re talking countries like North Korea that has made it virtually impossible to access the internet.

Web scraping is an exceedingly great way to grow your business, many people have grown their business using web scraping, they do so by applying web scraping their businesses in different forms. Why then should such an activity be illegal when it helps businesses?

In most countries, you’re good to go when we’re talking web scraping, that then brings us to the second consideration and that is the scraped website. What the scraped website considers illegal theft of it’s data. Most websites declare in their terms of service page and robots.txt if you’re allowed to scrape or not. Just so you know Google also scrapes websites that are indexed on their search engine result page, that should give you either that scraping the web isn’t illegal. Some of the sites scraped by Google have no idea Google is doing so.