Is web scraping Legal?

Is web scraping, web crawling or data extraction from websites, online store and travel portal is Legal in Internet ?

Thanks

 

I am not a lawyer but I have a general understanding I think..

If the content is free for public use and not copyrighted then by all means scrape it.. but anything you scrape which is the sole property of an individual or company then you could face prosecution.

Common sense really.

 

IT's the use, not the scraping, which is the problem. Doesn't seem to bother Google, though. Biggest scraper in the world.

 

A copyright is the exclusive property right granted to the author or creator of original works including literary, dramatic, musical, artistic, and certain other intellectual works.

Despite what some people think -- if it is posted on the Internet it already belongs to somebody.

The way in which copyright protection is secured is frequently misunderstood. No publication or registration or other action in the Copyright Office is required to secure copyright. Copyright is Secured Automatically upon Creation!

Therefore, scraping and re-posting something on the Internet violates the copyrights of the original creator.

 

All of that being said, I think scraping is perfectly legal.

 

Every time you look at a page, your browser 'scrapes' it. 

 

This holds for websites operated by US residents, laws in other countries may differ!

... unless the content is published under a "permissive" license

 

It's legal to scrape any webpage for personal use, as in offline browsing. If you re-publish copyrighted material online, then you'll be in trouble, sooner or later the original publisher will get to know about this.
And then what's the use of this? Your website will get de-indexed because of duplicate content.

I personally sometimes scrape valuable information so I can read it later in case the website goes down.

 

This really is, in many ways, a gray area, because of the proliferation of RSS. Syndicating content through RSS feeds is dramatically changing the landscape of content publication and re-publication. Most bloggers I know are quite torn over the issue of a full RSS feed vs a partial one just because of web scraping.

For those that put our a full RSS feed, you are literally giving your content is a nice, neat little bundle just waiting to be lifted. The partial feeds, while protective of the content, tend to be very detractive to people that rely heavily on feed readers to aggregate large volumes of content.

I personally believe using the title and short description with a proper link back to the original site is fine. The important factor is that there must be a clear disclosure that the content is used in such a way as not to imply ownership or copyrights. I use this approach with my NewsHound (see sig for link) ticker where I use the title. I believe as long as you make every reasonable effort to NOT infringe on the copyright holder, you shouldn't have any problems. There is also a "fair use" clause in the DMCA where you are allowed to quote a certain percentage of the original content with a proper link.

Here is an online news paper that uses this technique:

http://www.israelherald.com/

Notice that always provide the link to the original source and don't claim ownership of the external content.

 

The question is about scraping, not re-publication.

 

That is what I was thinking...yahoo, google, msn and plenty more are showing excerpts of people's sites on their own sites. In a day when large companies are patenting seeds of all things, ( Monsanto ) what is to be expected with your copyright notice? Do they need our permission to show our data on their computers?

 

The first is done by a machine controlled by a human. The second is done with a machine controlled by a human.


Boy, this gets complicated... what is the basic difference between a robot arriving to a site and ..... a person accessing the same site and copying and pasting what they see. Both are under control of a human. I feel like I am opening a can of worms here.

 

In terms of a splog or autoblog, they can be one in the same. What does the scrapper do with the content they just scrapped? Re-publish it. Search engines only publish meta-data, which as defined by the w3c, is not scrapping.

 

Its a mess. The issue entirely revolves around what is going to be done with the scrapped content. what percentage of the content is going to be used, and whether proper citation of the content will be given. The answers to these questions really define the pivotal legal issue of infringement while considering intent with or without malice.

 

They are not the same. I can think of many uses for scraped data that do not involve re-publication.

 

Proving malice means having to go before a court, which makes lawyers lots of money... I am not one, but it looks like that is a self-serving circle.

 

For the lawyers, indeed. Also added to this mess is that the DMCA automatically favor the content rights holder in most cases.

Here are a few links that only add to the murkiness:

http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2006/08/29/why-rss-scraping-isnt-ok/

http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2007/09/20/the-dmca-on-7-search-engines/

http://newmedialaw.proskauer.com/tags/dmca/

 

Scraping public content is fine... however certain ways of using that content can certainly violate a wide array of laws.

 

You just brought up one of the biggest problems with the DMCA, that being what constitutes public content. Fair use advocates have long contested that if the copyright is not explicitly displayed it is public because the nature of the internet is public unless the content has some form of authorization protect such as a login screen or authorization method.

Cases have been won in favor of the DMCA supporting an implied copyrights even though the content is freelyaccessable through open public means and does not display an explicit copyright.

Here are a couple links that go into this issue in more detail:

http://www.templetons.com/brad/copymyths.html

http://www.amerindianarts.us/articles/digital_millennium_copyright_act.shtml

 

Technically, scraping is just getting the information, it has nothing to do with what you do with that information. So, copyright laws do not come into play at all, UNTIL you attempt to reuse or republish that information. If they are displaying it publicly on their website, you can use a scraping program to download it all to your computer for your own viewing pleasure, and there is no violation of any laws at all.