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posted by martyb on Wednesday July 31 2019, @06:36AM   Printer-friendly
from the Arachnophobia dept.

"Come on, I worked so hard on this project! And this is publicly accessible data! There's certainly a way around this, right? Or else, I did all of this for nothing... Sigh..."

Yep - this is what I said to myself, just after realizing that my ambitious data analysis project could get me into hot water. I intended to deploy a large-scale web crawler to collect data from multiple high profile websites. And then I was planning to publish the results of my analysis for the benefit of everybody. Pretty noble, right? Yes, but also pretty risky.

Interestingly, I've been seeing more and more projects like mine lately. And even more tutorials encouraging some form of web scraping or crawling. But what troubles me is the appalling widespread ignorance on the legal aspect of it.

So this is what this post is all about - understanding the possible consequences of web scraping and crawling. Hopefully, this will help you to avoid any potential problem.

Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer. I'm simply a programmer who happens to be interested in this topic. You should seek out appropriate professional advice regarding your specific situation.

https://benbernardblog.com/web-scraping-and-crawling-are-perfectly-legal-right/


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 31 2019, @03:07PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 31 2019, @03:07PM (#873572)

    If you took that printed newspaper and ran every page through a (very large!) copier and then started handing out copies of it on the street corner you might find out very quickly that there's something that can be done about that.

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Freeman on Wednesday July 31 2019, @05:43PM

    by Freeman (732) on Wednesday July 31 2019, @05:43PM (#873631) Journal

    True. Also True: I can copy all of the freely available stuff. Then use that stuff to come up with statistics or what not on my own. Then, legally publish those statistics.

    --
    Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"