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It's a complex subject.

For example, the Linkedin case : https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/08/court-rejects-li...

Craiglist sued some companies too.

To my understanding, scraping can be legal if it's done properly, meaning not sending too many requests at the same time, and if it does not affect the underlying infrastructure.

It seems like in the US or in Europe, even if there is any anti-bot / anti-scraping section in the website's TOS, public data can be scraped. Sometimes, even "private" data can be extracted using bots. For example, lots of "bank account aggregators" has won lawsuits against banks.



The issue is that if you allowed all web scrapping you could DDOS websites and get a free out of jail card by telling "oh, we were simply scrapping some data and it glitched out".


That sounds like a possibly-less-time-in-jail-card.




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