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What is the best web scraping software for building contact information databases from online directories?

Web Scraping: Can I be sued if they are sure that the information in my website is theirs but unable to prove I scrapped them?

  • If I have a website that shows a transformed information from another couple of sites, and I am going to argue that I manually accessed the publicly available information in their website and If they can't prove that I did a web scrapping (using any tool - say via a proxy), Can I be sued? Will they be able to bring my website down legally?

  • Answer:

    Technically, this may boil down to what was stated in the sites Terms of Use at the time that you scraped them. If it has language like, "all content copyright of xyz company", then it may not matter the means by which you aggregated their content. Absent such a claim of ownership, you may have an argument if their TOU only prohibits the automated crawling of their site but makes no mention of copying and pasting manually. Given that you are acknowledging having used a scraper you would, of course, be lying if you argued that you didn't scrape the content (but isn't that what lawyers are sometimes used for). Perhaps you could take the time to use your current source websites as reference and develop your own unique content that would keep you out of trouble and let you sleep at night.

Scott Wilson at Quora Visit the source

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If you are going to be re-using the data in the exact same form in a way to directly compete with the source website, probably yes..irrespective of whether you manually obtained it or crawled that info. The real legality depends on how you use the final data and not how you acquire it (obviously given that you obliged by that site's robots.txt). For more info, you can read our post here- http://blog.promptcloud.com/2013/01/is-crawling-legal.html P.S. I'm not a lawyer and the above represents my limited knowledge on web crawling legalities.

Arpan Jha

No, there is no any restriction on web scraping for others website. You can scrape data from the link is available on the web page. For this type of service, I have one best tool. It is free to download, and It is only one that works well. It’s main feature is that it is kept always updated. ! I’ve been using it for three years now, and I can’t believe that it is not as popular as it should be considering, anyone can download it.  It is called as http://www.easydatafeed.com.                                                     Some features of scraping are listed out below: • Run Daily Schedules • Set Scrape Limits • Set Thread and Speed • Password Protected Scrape You can read about how to use it here: http://www.easydatafeed.com/open-source/ They also have developers you can hire to do the job for you; their Skype is “easydatafeed”

Ridhima Rawat

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