A scraper company, funded by magic money (Knight Foundation grants) and $1m of VC, convinced a (UK) Government department to pay them to scrape our site for some analysis the department wanted. They'd never contacted us, never asked for permission, never asked if we could supply the data. Our company was bumping along at this point and having to lay people off. Income from a nice lucrative Government contract would have kept a couple more people in work.

The scraper company's FAQ was, in my view, full-on unethical:

> "we check the robots.txt file. If the site permits robots in general to scrape their site (NOT just GoogleBot!), then we will do so. We will make no effort to look for other terms and conditions as well."

You will ostentatiously "make no effort to look" for T&Cs in case they prohibit the significant contract you're about to sign with the Government? Whoa.

So how I feel about web scraping is simple: "don't be evil". If you're diverting income or traffic from the original site, don't do it. If you're genuinely adding value, go for it, but be open, be prepared to work with the original site, and be prepared to accede to their wishes.

We're talking a custom scraper written for this site and this site only.

Yes, I am expecting the people who spend hours inspecting the source of my site, and then writing a custom scraper for it, to spend 30 seconds reading the T&Cs first.

If you want people to read it put your content behind a sign up with a checkbox.

Seen here: https://kazuar.github.io/scraping-tutorial/

If you're using my data to hijack my traffic, without asking, you could have all the right justifications in the world but you're still a prick. Who knows, maybe your orphanage building app will move me tears once I hear about it and I'll give you free access.

EDIT - I can't reply to your comment below, but FWIW I agree that scraping sites in this manner is unethical. I am merely describing the logic that most scrapers go through for self justification and legal protection.

But whatever. It just saddens me that the internet is a constant "don't be a dick" battle with companies like the scraper guys.

(edit - understood :) )

Incidentally, I'll be shopping later. May I give you $5 for you to drive to London and take me there? I was going to steal your car, but then I figured I'd be a good citizen and demand you provide it to me at your own, prohibitive, loss.

If you put something on a http endpoint then I can download it. The terms of use of the material just regulates what I can do with it (republish it) but I can't possibly be forbidden to download it.

Anyone with a web server is of course free to just block my attempt to download their page, via a user-agent filer or any other method.

Edit: IANAL so I have zero idea how law is actually applied around the world. My view is just that "how on earth would it be possible to enforce a contract I never saw?".

My view of course also says that I'm free to download the data at

http://secret.somecompany.com:8081/secrets/data.bin

Because they exposed it at a public http endpoint. I'm not so sure everyone (including somecompany) would agree with that. I think it's still perfectly reasonable that I'm allowed to do that - and that the restrictions that may apply to material I reach that way is only related to how I use it. Them posting it publicly on the internet (even if it's not linked) is the same as them having it on a billboard. I very much doubt that's how law works though.

That's a poor example, because they most likely did not intend for that information to be publicly available, and just did a poor job securing it.

Real-world analogy: if you happen to find someone's house with an unlocked front door, that does not give you permission to go looking around inside. It doesn't matter that you don't steal anything, and it doesn't matter that nobody knows you were there. You're still not allowed in and by going in you're breaking the law.

If your example was for content that's retrieved as the default web page for a public DNS entry, or a page that's reachable by following links from the website's default page (including urls in meta, link, and script tags), then I think you're on solid standing as far as being allowed to retrieve the content. At that point, copyright laws and ToS govern what you're allowed to do with the content, with the safe assumption being that you're allowed to view it, but not republish it (except for fair-use excerpts.)

But in this case you are asking the server for permission to come in. Unlike a lock, a server has situational awareness to decide if it says yes or no. We even call it a server, à la servant. If the maid acting as an agent for the homeowner at this hypothetical house invited you in, against the wishes of the homeowner, are you still breaking the law?

Your example is more akin to the maid wandering off leaving the front door open. That's not an invite to come in, that's a poor choice of maid.

We can agree that a maid that lets the wrong people in is a poor choice of made, but the maid is the one responding to the request. A door/lock does not deal with requests at all.

To extend this analogy a little bit, lets say that the homeowner told the maid that they can "give the old tv, the toaster or any other item in the garage to anyone who asks." A stranger comes and asks the maid for the golf clubs in the garage that the homeowner forgot about.

In this case, the homeowner did not explicitly expose the golf clubs to the public, but gave permission to the maid to give them out. Did the homeowner not grant public access to the golf clubs?

The question is of course in what situations I should have known I stumbled across something they didn't intend for me to see.

Googles scraper certainly walks up to every door, and then publishes what it finds. If you accidentally publish something and then google index it, and someone reaches it via google, it's hard to say it wasn't public.

If you accidentally put a link on your public website to content you didn't want public, and Google indexes it, then someone else fetches it, yeah, that's your fault for exposing it. It's also your responsibility for telling Google to remove it from their index. But if someone is poking around to see if urls are valid (eg: the /.ssh/id_rsa requests my website gets) that's breaking and entering, even though I'd be negligent for leaving my keys on the webserver like that.

I imagine in addition to public URLs they also use URLs entered into Chrome (which isn't that public) and since they host DNS they probably crawl domain names requested through them too.

Legally I'm not sure what they stand on to do that but they're big enough now so I guess they don't worry too much about that nowadays.

For example, in the weeks before an Apple event, people tend to visit presumed unannounced product pages (by guessing) etc.

I'm guessing that varies and is decided by legal precedent only once it becomes an issue.

But my point is this: what service have I used, and what terms can I be assumed to have agreed to if I do this

    > wget $random_url > /dev/null

In this case it thus doesn't whether or not you even saw the contract. You are bound by the ToS because it can be expected of you to search for it during continued use of the service.

For example, it is illegal for companies to document the religious beliefs of a person BUT if this is a service for certain religious community (e.g. a forum for a church) then the term that they have to disclose their religious belief is reasonable (given that they don't share this information with anyone, of course).

As for the ads, I don't know. It might be unreasonable to have users agree to subject themselves to third-party ads in order to use the service. But again, I am not a laywer.

I'd say the TOS have to apply to the "service" you're consuming and not the website itself. Otherwise, what happens if you use just a text based browser? Or any other means not foreseen by the TOS?

An ad-blocker would be just the same, it's something that your browser does.

However, in other countries such as the US contract law is totally different, so this does not generalize at all.

Also, IANAL.

That material has been reduced to a number - which certainly can't be considered protected as a material.

Also disappointing that you're (perhaps willfully) ignoring the many reasons why photography is banned/strongly discouraged in some public places.

That's all - I just don't agree with you

"it's naughty for anyone else to do it" if that everyone are companies that will be using or monetizing that content without providing any kind of attribution or compensation to the source/creator.

Given the difference in the size of the internet now and then, the backlash faced for poor practices may not be comparable.. so perhaps not.

The simplest thing to do is NOT parallelize your scraper, and sleep for a few seconds between requests.

Or do you also plan on suing Google once they scrape your site?

> "scraping" site every 15 minutes with massive ddos

Google doesn't scrape every 15 minutes. It was implied that they scraped the site often enough to cause a DDoS.

Additionally, it clearly wasn't a DDoS. Quoting from the parent:

> Some swedish equal rights server was "scraping" site every 15 minutes with massive ddos. We put capacha for the server ip only (let them scratch their heads now) and let it be

If there is only one server ip, it is by definition not distributed. Just a misuse of the term DDoS.

Google has a variable timing crawler. Google News crawls in almost realtime, but all Google crawlers back off if the site responds slow.

Additionally, Google respects `/robots.txt` (which allows the site owner to define a crawl delay) and uses sitemaps for hints, so it doesn't have to re-crawl every single HTTP object "every 15 minutes".

Did you mean "We couldn't handle the traffic caused by their scraping which lead to a denial of service"?

The simple formula is: "Create more value than you take." - read it as "Create more value for those whom you take from than the value you actually take from them."

If you scrap sport results from a sports page and create a competing product, as#hole move, don't do it and you will sued anyway.

Scrap sport results from a sport page, aggregate them into nice charts, but for detailed inspection the user has to go to the source (which you link to and want the user to use), you are good to go (from a product point of view, legally i.a.n.a.l).

The internet is not a zero-sum-game. Building on top of each other, even on data on top of each other, will lead to a better ecosystem, to more value for every participant.

My own take on it in general is that for personal/research use I'm not morally opposed to scraping, even when it's in violation of the ToS, with two conditions: that it doesn't place an unreasonable burden on the server, and that it doesn't invade people's privacy. The legal significance of the ToS is murky at best (disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer) but if the site asks you specifically to stop scraping them or puts up a technical barrier you should stop (morally and, in the US at least, legally: see craigslist v 3taps)

You don't really get to decide how somebody else's data gets used.

Using your sports stastics example, this will become a grey area as writing becomse more automated, but at the moment, a writer gets a 'statistic' like a score which is made publicly available. There are no limits on using that statistic. But you didn't automate the process of spreading the stats, you, in theory found a fact and wrote about it.

This is different from just giving a feed of stats, or linking through a bunch of services.

Instead of violating the ToS we have business contracts with each company, that give us the permission to scrape. We use this as a way to take control of integrations, and put the ball in our court, as most of these companies have little to no technical expertise or resource. By doing this we can create an integration as quickly as we want, instead of waiting months or even never managing to get one if it were to be done through an API.

Scraping can be a powerful tool in this respect, make sure you have permission, but ToS saying no scraping doesn't necessarily mean you can't get special permission.

ssh into the machine, select using a db commandline tool, return data back from stdout in csv format, parse data at our side. It's surprisingly fast and secure.

Technically, sites can do anything they want to make scraping more difficult. But from the moral (and, I hope, legal — at least in the future) standpoint, scraping should be your right.

It depends on what you do with the content, but generally I would agree.

The content doesn't become any less copyrighted just because you scraped it. Keep that in mind.

Be nice is important to. A site may not react well to you scrapping the content in 1000 parallel connections, so ramp up slowly, and back of if the site because unresponsive or slow. Google, Bing and others indexes sites all the time, and they play nice and almost never causes issues for site operators. Amateurs often causes issues and crash sites as do some wannabe search engines (I looking at you Eniro, answer your emails).

If you don't play nice expect to be blocked or get served 1GB junk files or images of beavers.

Things you should ALWAYS do when running a web scraper:

* Back off the target server becomes slow.

* Include a unique user agent.

* Include contact information or make easy to find your contact information, should problems arise. Sites may have an API or data feeds they would be willing to share instead.

* Respect robots.txt

* Publish your crawlers IP ranges, in case people REALLY want to block you.

Why _should_ scraping be your right, morally? Your convenience doesn't remove ownership of data.

* many good products/websites are based on scraped content

* many good products/websites are not feasible because of scraping limitations and limited access to data, even publicly funded data (e.g. no real estate ads with noise overlay despite the EU mandating noise maps in all member states; member states have prohibitive access rules for these maps)

* "rogue" scraping causes problems for many websites; blocking it creates problems for legitimate users of various proxy/anonymization services like Tor. Captchas are not a long-term solution, good programming defeats them.

I'd welcome a simple technical solution for scraping that takes into account the interests of site owners, other publishers, the public. The sooner publishers get together and build one, the better for them.

it is understandable that you want to be in phonebook but also that you dont want somebody random to enter, use your resources and copy everything because of some other interests.

if there would be some official list of all "phonebooks" and you would allow those to scan your site but block others i would do it.

scrapers from my side, spam my logs/analytics, fake real visits, try to spend my adword budget, some of them sign up with spam data and screw your conversions and testing and so on. if it was only search engine i would allow them but its not.

at this point i have the whole aws ip range blocked.

It's not that simple: Google has used scraped content in the past to build competing products to the sites it was from. Examples: reviews from shopping sites for Google Shopping, Yelp reviews for Google Places.

Google can do it because it basically owns your front door. Everyone else can't.

> at this point i have the whole aws ip range blocked.

From past experience: this will likely block some apps, possibly services like Alexa from accessing your site.

Indexing is simply the second step in the the process, scraping is the first step, and (users) searching the index is the third step.

Data yearns to be free, stop fighting it!

https://www.reddit.com/help/useragreement/

Doesn't really matter how we all feel about it. If you hit their radar, they'll go after you. Can be expensive, whether you're in the right or not.

You're more likely to hit their radar if you're trying to make money. I suspect you're using affiliate links, right?

And I did have affiliation links initially where I included the non-affiliate links next to them if people didn't want the affiliation. But then I got rid of those cause people didn't like it. I don't care about making money on it, just think it's interesting.

If you aren't trying to monetize, you will be lower on their radar, but not immune.

"By submitting user content to reddit, you grant us a royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, unrestricted, worldwide license to reproduce, prepare derivative works, distribute copies, perform, or publicly display your user content in any medium and for any purpose, including commercial purposes, and to authorize others to do so."

The original comment submitters could grant you a license on their own, but that might be difficult to coordinate.

I view this as significant mainly because it changes what they could sue you for, and any fair use evaluation if copyright does enter into it at some point.

I suspect Reddit might claim a Collection Copyright in the compilation of posts/comments - so even if you could acquire your own license to a post and each of the comments - if you tried publishing that as a book, Reddit could claim the organisation of those individually copyrighted items is owned by them...

If anyone, I'm infringing on the copyright of the original author of the comment, while Reddit has no grounds for a copyright infringement lawsuit.

Where? I don't see anything that prohibits scraping. There are provisions against rehosting content, but that isn't scraping. You can scrape content without rehosting if you are locally scraping in an app, for example.

"I actually created a site...that scrapes...from Reddit...and shows that information."

"that scrapes comments and posts from Reddit that link to Amazon products and shows that information"

It's ambiguous, but my interpretation is that it's the Amazon content (or perhaps a summary thereof) that's being rehosted, not the reddit content.

I got some comments on this about people not liking me throwing the url in here but figure it'd explain things better.

And also, this post isn't just about whether or not what I'm doing here is legal and ok, overall thoughts on it as well.

And seems to surface funny or interesting things based on popularity, like the 55 gallon drums of "personal lube". So, the aggregation has some purpose.

Good luck with it, seems an interesting idea.

It's what you actually do with the information that matters. For example, republishing or otherwise distributing information when you have no right to do so may be an ethical and legal issue.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sui_generis_database_right

We were--at the time, scraping for lead information to add to our marketing database, and this isn't the thing I'm exactly the most proud of in my career. But we all make mistakes. I wouldn't do that again.

At the same time, we rotated things so that we weren't killing the websites in the niche market that we were trying to scrape for leads.

The algorithm was that we would seed Google, Yahoo, and Bing with certain keyword searches that were relevant. Then we'd take the search results from the APIs and stuff them into an array. Then we would sort them proportionally. If we (like we did) most often get the most hits from google, followed by yahoo, and then by Bing, we'd stuff the results into an array and intersperse them.

So if we had 3x google results and 2x yahoo, and 1x bing, we wouldn't hit the google results first. We'd hit a google result 3x then a yahoo 2x, then a bing 1x and cycle.

It was a decent way of doing things.

We never broke anyone's stuff. Even if it should have been.

In the grand scheme of things, I think that I did the most responsible thing I could have with the task I was assigned. But the task falls into a general category of things I don't approve of.

It certainly wasn't illegal, and it probably wasn't unethical, but it was definitely gross, and my internal standards tell me to avoid things that make me feel gross.

That said, I'm kind of pleased with the technical results. Up until that time in my career, I'd never encountered a sorting algorithm that handled things based on the proportion of similar items in an array. I'm sure that other people have done this and that there's no way it's novel at all. But it was a cool challenge to make a shady task perform in a way that didn't break other people's shit just so that we could maximize our own efficiency.

There are some websites whose primary business model is providing content in exchange for something: a subscription fee, or advertising eyeballs. They have a very strong financial interest in your not scraping their content and providing it to others on different terms.

There are other websites who make some content available and explicitly authorize people to use it: various datasets and RSS feeds and such.

And then there is a wide swath of websites that have adopted generic TOS that prohibit scraping, or they prohibit it because they haven't given it much thought and can't think of any particular reason off the top of their heads to permit it.

So what you really want to know is what sites in the third category would consider a sensible scraping policy, if they had to give it sufficient thought.

In other words, if they don't just default to a prohibition because it's already in a TOS template or because they haven't thought it through, what's the rationale for either blocking or not blocking scrapers?

So to answer your questions:

    > Are comments on sites like this public data or private?

    > Does the purpose of your scraping make a difference, if one use is just a project but another would be selling the data?

The history is littered with people who took a bet, and ended up succeeding or failing upwards.

Finally ignorance is actually preferable to knowledge. By writing this question or say having this conversation over an email you are simply creating a paper trail that can only harm you if you get sued tomorrow. [3]

[1] https://photo.stackexchange.com/questions/53304/what-is-the-...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/07/business/media/rap-genius...

[3] https://www.fastcompany.com/1588353/steal-it-and-other-inter...

But in general, I'm sympathetic to all scrapping efforts that provide benefit to people for free.

But I do have a problem with scraping other sites to detract traffic away from them. Perhaps if it’s for data analysis. Also, I would be very careful as some governments have very strict privacy laws (EU, for example) and you never know what you are scraping.

But one of the other problems is that web scrapers can be used for very nefarious purposes – see this article on web scraping attacks: https://www.incapsula.com/web-application-security/web-scrap...

Though legally it might be punished, so you better don't reveal yourself.

My bank account can be accessed from the internet, is it public? Or do you mean without logging in? In that case, are quora answers public?

And if you scrape, just don't be a dick about it. Don't hammer the site with your buggy scraper doing 1k hits per second. And don't resell the data.

Not happening. Sports data is too much valuable. High sale value.

Don't give away for free what you could charge a lot of money for.

That does not say that one has the right to publish the exact same content. Then it becomes a copyright issue. But remixing it into another site, like yours? You have every right.

Note: That might depend where you live. Legislation might differ, US' fair use is a different concept than germanys public data concept, for example.

In Europe we have IPR covering data though.

Web scraping is going the way webbots work now. Have to scrape data to automate stuff.

Can you be a bit more specific?

Someone putting up a bunch of words doesn't bind you to a contract with respect to scraping or anything else. (At most they can give up a right. They can put something in the public domain, for example, by giving up their copyright.)

To give some extreme examples: What if the site says you owe them a million dollars if you even look at the site? What if someone put a sign on their lawn that says anyone stepping on the grass can be legally shot? Are you OK with those just because they said so?

Scraping is copying, which is an exclusive privilege of the copyright owner under copyright. In the absence of a license or a copyright exception, you have no legal right to exercise that privilege. Someone putting words on a page might give you a license for the use you intend.

You don't need to be bound to a contract, because this isn't about restricting a right you have in the absence of license.

Is it necessarily copying in a sense that is different from how a web browser acquires the resource to render it? For example, scraping data to derive some non-protected facts could be considered consumption in the same sense a human reading it via a client would, and doesn't require storing a copy any more permanently than a browser.

Intent is probably a lot more important, legally, than the fact that you are technically copying something simply by "accessing" it in a browser. If you are scraping with the intent to extract and copy the copyright protected content, sure, that's a good point, but that's by no means the only use of scraping.

Personally, and I understand that this isn't how it works legally, I think that the contract is implied by the protocol. I request copies of information by means of HTTP. If the distributor doesn't want me to have a copy, they can choose not to respond with a copy. I never make a copy in that case: the server is, hence I have not reproduced the work. It's not me taking a book to a photocopier, it's me calling the publisher and asking them to send me a copy of page 237.

It's different in purpose of not mechanism, and insofar as there is an implicit license to copy in a browser for display, it is another step to establish that such a license extends to other purposes even if the mechanism is the same.

Also not that the existence and scope of implied license can be affected by the presence and terms of an explicit license, which is one reason you might want to read the T&C prior to scraping.

Also, the validity of a set of T&C that I didn't explicitly agree to and likely never read is dubious, inconsistently enforcable at best.

No, I'm not. Fair use is one (of several) copyright exceptions and, as such, is addressed in my post.

This is changing, though, with Google's slow but steady movement of organic search results down the fold.

Google won't bombard your site with requests and at worst will cache data but not try to make use of it.

http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic...

Of course there are people building services that scrape certain sites that appear to be off limits to you.

Those people scraping sites that are explicitly prohibited either:

a. are breaking the rules, potentially the law if it's explicitly prohibited in a ToS, and will eventually have to deal with getting banned, or sued. It's quite a gray area legally but here are some laws that could be used against you:

Violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). Violation of California Penal Code. Violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Breach of contract. Trespass. Misappropriation. Source: Linkedin v. Doe Defendants

b. have an agreement with the website owners allowing them to scrape certain portions of their site.

c. scraping data with no rules concerning it.

For example, Facebook. has a ToS for scraping: https://www.facebook.com/apps/site_scraping_tos_terms.php At the bottom there is a form for those that want to get permission to scrape the site. And their robots.txt is heavily used to control crawlers with User-Agents they know. http://facebook.com/robots.txt

It's rare you would run into legal issues, but possible. The question is whether it's morally okay for you to scrape any data you want.

Chloe has expended effort/energy/resources to gather and collate information which provides value in some way to Sam.

Sam has invested nothing, risked nothing, and expended no effort with regard to that information.

Chloe decides, in her own interest, to give the public access to the information.

Does Chloe have a moral right to try and impose conditions on that access?

Does Sam have a moral duty to make a good-faith effort to abide by those conditions?

My answer to both of these questions is yes.