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What is the legality of scraping an API for commercial use?

  • If I were to scrape an API that has a non-commercial and commercial use clause, store that info in a database and then use that infomation commercially what are the legalities of doing such a thing and what would happen if I were to be caught? Theoretical: I scrape the Echo Nest music API for popular artists, store the info in a MySQL database, then use that info for my application stored in the database. My application is not constantly making API calls, I'm scraping the content and then storing it.

  • Answer:

    According to Wikipedia, "database rights" exists under EU laws (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_right) which governs the "copying and dissemination of information in computer database." The law recognises that an investment has been made in compiling the database, so copying would be in violation of the law. I am not a lawyer, but from my limited understanding, I believe that prior to "database rights," the copyright laws did not cover the compilation of data but does cover the presentation and arrangement of data in a database. The same Wikipedia article cites that no similiar rule to the "database rights" exists in the US as yet, although database providers are lobbying for it. In the meantime, copyright laws exist to protect the presentation / arrangement of data.

Cecilia Liao at Quora Visit the source

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Scraping of original content violates copyrights, but ifwe talk about gathering of general information available to the public, then most likely these actions do not violate any laws or intellectual property rights.  It is a widely used practice to gather information at various web pages. We use EasyDataFeed tool to grab data from various websites and represent it in form of tables and sheets on our sites. By the time there were no issues associated with any violations of intellectual property rights. The tool is developed by ShoppingCartElit. We host here three online projects. I would advise you to have a chat with their representative for more details. Disclaimer: I’ve used this company to run online projects.

Henry Jorber

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