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"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/
(Score: 3, Informative) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday July 31 2019, @10:40PM
Learn to read and learn copyright law. For starters we're not talking about anything you have to pay to see, we're talking shit put out for anyone to view at no cost. Also, you can sit there and make as many copies of Harry Potter as you like every day for a year and nothing will happen to you. Distributing them is what will get you in trouble. Running word count analysis on them will not.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.