Is Screen Scraping Legal
Web Scraping 101: 10 Myths that Everyone Should Know
1. Web Scraping is illegal
Many people have false impressions about web scraping. It is because there are people don’t respect the great work on the internet and use it by stealing the content. Web scraping isn’t illegal by itself, yet the problem comes when people use it without the site owner’s permission and disregard of the ToS (Terms of Service). According to the report, 2% of online revenues can be lost due to the misuse of content through web scraping. Even though web scraping doesn’t have a clear law and terms to address its application, it’s encompassed with legal regulations. For example:
Violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA)
Violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)
Trespass to Chattel
Misappropriation
Copy right infringement
Breach of contract
Photo by Amel Majanovic on Unsplash
2. Web scraping and web crawling are the same
Web scraping involves specific data extraction on a targeted webpage, for instance, extract data about sales leads, real estate listing and product pricing. In contrast, web crawling is what search engines do. It scans and indexes the whole website along with its internal links. “Crawler” navigates through the web pages without a specific goal.
3. You can scrape any website
It is often the case that people ask for scraping things like email addresses, Facebook posts, or LinkedIn information. According to an article titled “Is web crawling legal? ” it is important to note the rules before conduct web scraping:
Private data that requires username and passcodes can not be scrapped.
Compliance with the ToS (Terms of Service) which explicitly prohibits the action of web scraping.
Don’t copy data that is copyrighted.
One person can be prosecuted under several laws. For example, one scraped some confidential information and sold it to a third party disregarding the desist letter sent by the site owner. This person can be prosecuted under the law of Trespass to Chattel, Violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), Violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) and Misappropriation.
It doesn’t mean that you can’t scrape social media channels like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. They are friendly to scraping services that follow the provisions of the file. For Facebook, you need to get its written permission before conducting the behavior of automated data collection.
4. You need to know how to code
A web scraping tool (data extraction tool) is very useful regarding non-tech professionals like marketers, statisticians, financial consultant, bitcoin investors, researchers, journalists, etc. Octoparse launched a one of a kind feature – web scraping templates that are preformatted scrapers that cover over 14 categories on over 30 websites including Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, eBay, Instagram and more. All you have to do is to enter the keywords/URLs at the parameter without any complex task configuration. Web scraping with Python is time-consuming. On the other side, a web scraping template is efficient and convenient to capture the data you need.
5. You can use scraped data for anything
It is perfectly legal if you scrape data from websites for public consumption and use it for analysis. However, it is not legal if you scrape confidential information for profit. For example, scraping private contact information without permission, and sell them to a 3rd party for profit is illegal. Besides, repackaging scraped content as your own without citing the source is not ethical as well. You should follow the idea of no spamming, no plagiarism, or any fraudulent use of data is prohibited according to the law.
Check Below Video: 10 Myths About Web Scraping!
6. A web scraper is versatile
Maybe you’ve experienced particular websites that change their layouts or structure once in a while. Don’t get frustrated when you come across such websites that your scraper fails to read for the second time. There are many reasons. It isn’t necessarily triggered by identifying you as a suspicious bot. It also may be caused by different geo-locations or machine access. In these cases, it is normal for a web scraper to fail to parse the website before we set the adjustment.
Read this article: How to Scrape Websites Without Being Blocked in 5 Mins?
7. You can scrape at a fast speed
You may have seen scraper ads saying how speedy their crawlers are. It does sound good as they tell you they can collect data in seconds. However, you are the lawbreaker who will be prosecuted if damages are caused. It is because a scalable data request at a fast speed will overload a web server which might lead to a server crash. In this case, the person is responsible for the damage under the law of “trespass to chattels” law (Dryer and Stockton 2013). If you are not sure whether the website is scrapable or not, please ask the web scraping service provider. Octoparse is a responsible web scraping service provider who places clients’ satisfaction in the first place. It is crucial for Octoparse to help our clients get the problem solved and to be successful.
8. API and Web scraping are the same
API is like a channel to send your data request to a web server and get desired data. API will return the data in JSON format over the HTTP protocol. For example, Facebook API, Twitter API, and Instagram API. However, it doesn’t mean you can get any data you ask for. Web scraping can visualize the process as it allows you to interact with the websites. Octoparse has web scraping templates. It is even more convenient for non-tech professionals to extract data by filling out the parameters with keywords/URLs.
9. The scraped data only works for our business after being cleaned and analyzed
Many data integration platforms can help visualize and analyze the data. In comparison, it looks like data scraping doesn’t have a direct impact on business decision making. Web scraping indeed extracts raw data of the webpage that needs to be processed to gain insights like sentiment analysis. However, some raw data can be extremely valuable in the hands of gold miners.
With Octoparse Google Search web scraping template to search for an organic search result, you can extract information including the titles and meta descriptions about your competitors to determine your SEO strategies; For retail industries, web scraping can be used to monitor product pricing and distributions. For example, Amazon may crawl Flipkart and Walmart under the “Electronic” catalog to assess the performance of electronic items.
10. Web scraping can only be used in business
Web scraping is widely used in various fields besides lead generation, price monitoring, price tracking, market analysis for business. Students can also leverage a Google scholar web scraping template to conduct paper research. Realtors are able to conduct housing research and predict the housing market. You will be able to find Youtube influencers or Twitter evangelists to promote your brand or your own news aggregation that covers the only topics you want by scraping news media and RSS feeds.
Source:
Dryer, A. J., and Stockton, J. 2013. “Internet ‘Data Scraping’: A Primer for Counseling Clients, ” New York Law Journal. Retrieved from
Is Web Scraping Legal ? – WebHarvy
Web Scraping is the technique of automatically extracting data from websites using software/script. Our software, WebHarvy, can be used to easily extract data from any website without any coding/scripting knowledge.
Is it legal to scrape data from websites using software? The answer to this question is not a simple yes or no.
The real question here should be regarding how you plan to use the data which you have extracted from a website (either manually or via using software). Because the data displayed by most website is for public consumption. It is totally legal to copy this information to a file in your computer. But it is regarding how you plan to use this data that you should be careful about. If the data is downloaded for your personal use and analysis, then it is absolutely ethical. But in case you are planning to use it as your own, in your website, in a way which is completely against the interest of the original owner of the data, without attributing the original owner, then it is unethical, illegal.
Also, while extracting data from websites using software, since web scrapers can read and extract data from web pages more quickly than humans, care should be taken that the web scraping process does not affect the performance/bandwidth of the web server in any way. Most web servers will automatically block your IP, preventing further access to its pages, in case this happens.
Websites have their own ‘Terms of use’ and Copyright details whose links you can easily find in the website home page itself. The users of web scraping software/techniques should respect the terms of use and copyright statements of target websites. These refer mainly to how their data can be used and how their site can be accessed.
How to anonymously scrape data from websites?
Update: US federal court rules that web scraping does not violate hacking laws
Scrape Data Anonymously
WebHarvy is an easy-to-use visual web scraper which lets you scrape data anonymously from websites, thereby protecting your privacy. Proxy servers or VPNs can be easily used along with WebHarvy so that you are not connected directly to the web server during data extraction. Also, to minimize the load on web servers, and to avoid detection, there are options to automatically insert pauses & emulate a human user during the web scraping process.
Is Web Scraping Legal? 6 Misunderstandings About Web …
Hey guys, in my experience as a web scraping developer, I have come across so many misconceptions about web scraping. Because the reputation of web scraping has continued to get worse over the years, let’s shed light on some of the biggest misunderstandings about web scraping. Read the article or watch the video then let me know what else you would add to the list!
As web scraping is becoming more and more popular I think we need to get things straight. After a little research on the internet and considering the questions I often get asked, I’ve found that these six misconceptions are the most common about web scraping. If you are totally new to web scraping or you consider leveraging it the followings should be helpful for you.
Web scraping is illegal
Starting with the biggest BS around web scraping. Is web scraping legal? Yes, unless you use it unethically. Web scraping is just like any tool in the world. You can use it for good stuff and you can use it for bad stuff. Web scraping itself is not illegal. As a matter of fact, web scraping – or web crawling, were historically associated with well-known search engines like Google or Bing. These search engines crawl sites and index the web. Because these search engines built trust and brought back traffic and visibility to the sites they crawled, their bots created a favorable view towards web scraping. It is all about how you web scrape and what you do with the data you acquire.
A great example when web scraping can be illegal is when you try to scrape nonpublic data. Nonpublic data can be something that is not reachable for everyone on the web. Maybe you have to login to see the data. In this case web scraping is probably unethical, depending on the context. Also it does matter how nice you are technically when scraping a website. To learn more, I urge you to check out the most frequent legal issues associated with web scraping!
You need to code
Some people think that you need to be an expert programmer to scrape web data. However, there are software solutions out there like that make it so you don’t have to write any code. Also keep in mind that though scraping a website without coding is great but it’s not applicable in many cases. If you have to further process data (cleaning, deduplication, etc.. ) a web scraping software can’t really help you.
Web scraping projects traditionally are known to be labor intensive, leaving you with data that’s incomplete, inaccurate, unreliable, and out of date—while introducing high costs and business risk. ’s Web Data Integration removes this complexity and unifies fragmented data from across the internet into something you can trust.
Web scraping is cheap
Most people and businesses don’t want to deal with web scraping themselves. It is quite frequent that they hire a company that provides web scraping solutions or a freelancer. Now, just to get this straight, web scraping is cheap regarding the ROI it provides in most cases. At the same time, you should know that hiring a full-fledged web scraping service is gonna cost you money. If you do a quick research how much different vendors and freelancers charge for web scraping services you will find a huge difference. It’s because some companies and freelancers with higher rates do provide better services.
Also, you should figure out how complex your project is. For large, long-term projects I suggest hiring a vendor because they usually guarantee you’ll get your data every time on time. Also some web scraping companies provides additional useful services like further processing data to fit into your system. Once you figure out what your web data needs are, see how ’s Managed Data Service can help you solve your most complex, high-scale, high quality needs for web data.
The web scraper works forever
When building a scraper, we want it to work seamlessly forever and just deliver the data we need. Unfortunately it’s not that easy. The biggest challenge in web scraping is that websites are constantly changing. This is the nature of the current state of the internet. To keep up, we should always adjust our scraper so we can trust it delivers reliable and up-to-date data. Now, if you just setup your scraper with a freelancer dude then it’s gonna be a headache when the scraper wrecks(and it will sooner or later unfortunately) because you need to find another freelancer to make it work again or if you’re lucky the one who built the scraper is available at the moment.
You’re in a good position if you’re using a web scraping service because the vendor will take care of all the problems you will not even realize anything. The data is flowing as usual. So just keep in mind that if you need continuous data flowing into your system, you’ll need to watch your scraper and adjust if it wrecks.
Web scraping is all about selecting data from the HTML
This one is a myth often told by programmers who have never built a real world web scraper. I’ve heard this one soo many times. Like “It’s no big deal bro just write a regex and fetch the data from the html and you’re done. ” Sure web scraping is associated with fetching data from a website but the thing is what really matters is how you can use that data to drive your business. Web scraping is much more than getting raw data out of a website.
Web scraping – when done correctly – involves cleaning messy data(because 99% of the time raw data from the web is plain unusable), deduplication, all sort of filtering, integration with your current system, maybe analytics and visualization. It’s complex. Now you might say that hey at the end of the day you just want to see the raw data you don’t need any of the stuff just mentioned. That’s cool. But there’s a chance you’re leaving behind a massive amount of value on the table by not processing the data further.
Any website can be scraped
Website owners can make it really hard for bots to scrape data. There’s a bunch of ways to make a website scraping-proof. Although in reality, there’s no technical shield that could stop a full-fledged scraper from fetching data.
That being said, if the website has lots of scraper traps, captchas and other layers of defense against bots then surely web scraping is not welcomed there. In that case, you should think twice about it before scraping the website. Technically it’s possible to fight all types of bot defenses but do you really want? If the website proactively steps up against scrapers then it’s not a good idea to scrape it anyway.
Conclusion
Web data scraping and crawling aren’t illegal by themselves, but it is important to be ethical while doing it. Don’t tread onto other people’s sites without being considerate. Respect the rules of their site. Consider reading over their Terms of Service, read the file. If you suspect a site is preventing you from crawling, consider contacting the webmaster and asking permission to crawl their site. Don’t burn out their bandwidth–try using a slower crawl rate (like 1 request per 10-15 seconds). Don’t publish any content you find that was not intended to be published.
Web scraping has helped us make the best use of the web with services like Google and Bing search engines. It is a powerful tool that helps businesses leverage the data of the internet, but should be done respectfully.
Of course there are more things I could mention today I just wanted to tell you about the ones that I got the most and feel like these are the most crucial when it comes to leveraging web scraping. Comment below I would be glad to hear your thoughts!
Frequently Asked Questions about is screen scraping legal
Is it legal to screen scrape data from websites?
Web Scraping is the technique of automatically extracting data from websites using software/script. … Because the data displayed by most website is for public consumption. It is totally legal to copy this information to a file in your computer.
Is web scraping a crime?
Web scraping itself is not illegal. As a matter of fact, web scraping – or web crawling, were historically associated with well-known search engines like Google or Bing. These search engines crawl sites and index the web. … A great example when web scraping can be illegal is when you try to scrape nonpublic data.Nov 17, 2017
Is screen scraper safe?
Screen scraping is generally unregulated. Speed: Open Banking significantly reduces the time it takes to access account information. Processes that take screen scraping tools up to five minutes can be completed in seconds with Open Banking.Jan 4, 2019
