Scraping is not always legal and scrapers must first consider the copyrights of a website. For some web shops and providers, web scraping can certainly have negative consequences – for example, if the page ranking suffers as a result of aggregators. From time to time, companies may sue comparison portals to compel them to cease web scraping. In these cases, however, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals previously ruled that scraping was not illegal and did not violate anti-hacking laws where information was freely accessible. However, companies are at liberty to install technical measures to prevent scraping.
In other words, scraping is legal when the extracted data is freely accessible to third parties on the internet. To stay on the right side of the law, it’s important to consider the following points when web scraping:
- Consider and observe copyright. If data is copyright-protected, it may not be published elsewhere.
- Website operators have a right to install technical measures to prevent web scraping. They must not be circumvented.
- If data use relates to a user registration or usage agreement, this data may not be scraped.
- Scraping technology is not allowed to hide advertising, general terms of use or disclaimers.
Although scraping is permitted in many cases, it can certainly lead to destructive consequences or even be misused for illegal purposes. The technology is often used for spam, for example. Thanks to this technology, spammers can collect email addresses and send spam emails to these recipients.