Legality of Web Scraping User-Submitted Content?
tstegart: Well, there's the real world answer, and the legal answer. Not too sure about the legal answer, thats always murky. Some things are copyrighted, some aren't. You can't just take someone's story, or art, and use it on your own site without permission. Usually the creator has all rights until they are given away. Even if they have uploaded it to another site, that doesn't mean they have given you permission though. On the other hand, some information can't be controlled. If Bob says it's 70 degrees in San Francisco right now, you can totally say its 70 degrees. If the Mets won, you're welcome to say the Mets won. The Drudge Report does nothing except report headlines.In the real world, however, people steal information all the time. Its not polite though. Usually people ask for attributes. I don't think a policy of only removing it when someone asks you to would be polite. That's like stealing something when no-one is home and leaving a note saying you'll return it if they ask you to.Also, pure scraping, even of non-copyrighted information can get you into trouble if the other person had paid for that information, like a news site. They pay for their news. Scraping it and making your own news site (with full content, not just headlines) is illegal.So the short answer is that the original creator still owns the content, and no you probably can't have it.