Ethics and laws regarding scraping websites?
tylercarbone: So, copyright law doesn't care whether you scraped the data or acquired in some other way. That is, either you can use the information under copyright law, or you can't. If you can't use it, then getting it through some method other than scraping won't help you -- and if you can use it, then scraping won't change the legality.So you need to make sure there isn't a copyright violation, which is going to depend on the specific information you're looking at.There's still a potential problem, though, unrelated to copyright. After eBay v. Bidder's Edge, it can be trespass to chattels to scrape data in violation of a site's TOS. In the eBay case, the court held that it was in violation of trespass law because the eBay TOS prohibited robots... so it would have been fine if Bidder's Edge had taken the data manually.Basically, you need to make sure the data isn't copyrighted, and you need to make sure that scraping the data isn't in violation of the site's TOS.