screencrapers

Do you know what 'screenscraping' exactly is?
I believe it's kind of getting data from some site and showing it in another, but that sounds a little illegal unless previously authorized...

 

Yes scraping is essentially stealing content from a site...

It is not legal.

 

ok, nevermind.

You see, I was looking for a weather rss feed and I stumbled upon this site that clearly states that they provide screenscraping scripts and stuff.

Thanks...

 

Could you PM me the URL?

Thanks...

 

It can also be used for good purposes. I've seen in the past a product (can't remember its name) that was supposed to produce a mobile-friendly website out of any regular website, so there's less maintenance. They used scraping (didn't work well with dynamic pages, though).

J.D.

 

Yeah, It does have it's "legitimate" uses, but the term scraping for me, I always associate with content theft.

 

I don't remember the url right now, but it's easy to find once you look at the top of the SERPS on G for weather rss feeds.
I'll check anyway and come back.

 

There is definitely a good use for them out there. Back during the elections, I set up a script that grabbed the latest vote tallies from a few sources and put them up on a page for myself and a few guys at the office. It makes for an easy way to aggregate information, especially if you want frequent updates and don't want to have to go to four places every hour to get them.

There are plenty of books out there on the subject. Spidering Hacks by Oreilly Publishing is a great one that has lots of listings of great uses for spiders.

 

Oh, under what law?

I can think of any laws against it specfically.

It would only depend on the use of it, and the specific content that you are using that could then make it illegal.

Otherwise search engines are illegal , no?

 

since you are in the usa, you may want data on weather in the usa? If so the national weather services data is in the public domain, and contrary to what others stated would be legal to use.

 

That act of screenscraping itself is not illegal, but using the content as your own is copyright theft.

 

So you would be ok if you stated where the data come from?
No explicit authorization needed?

I am wondering whether an implicit form of permission to use other sites info exists other than that of search engines. These appear to be legally using data in various forms, with no significant opposition.
Could screenscraping be a similar case?

I personally doubt it...

 

no. attribution alone does not make it ok. What matters is the type of data, and if it is copyrighted and/or copyrightable.

 

If you are just grabbing a snippet from a site, you MAY be ok... but the rules pertaining to what is a snippet (a la a google search result) are vague and you'd have to consult a lawyer if considering doing this on a large scale. I'm sure google's lawyers had a long hard look at that.

 

If you're concerned about your copyright for things like search engines you can always prvent them from indexing the site using robots.txt. Screenscaping is somthing completely different.