Legal issues with web scraping

Is Screen Scraping Legal?

Article about the legal aspects of screen scraping in Hews blog. Before moving into the legal area the article goes through defining screen scraping and a couple of the more common countermeasures.

Problems with legal action against scraping

There are two major problems with using legal action to stop web scraping.

• The first is obviously that since the scraping is performed on the Internet the scraper may be located anywhere in the world and he or she may not abide the laws of the country where the site is located.
• The Second problem is the sheer scale of scraping and the fact that it is not trivial to identify the scrapers at most times. If you have a large site with valuable information or business logic that attracts scrapers there will probably be hundreds of offenders each month and pursuing legal action against them all will be very costly.

You may think that it would be enough with one or two to deter the others but from our experience most scrapers care little for that risk and hide behind open proxy servers or other anonomizing services that make them close to impossible to identify.

The article looks at the case Southwest airlines vs Outtask and gives some helpful pointers to what laws may be used in the US at least.

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