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Not quite. https://www.law360.com/articles/757906/qvc-website-crash-suit-against-resultly-gets-trimmed https://www.law360.com/articles/757906/qvc-website-crash-

Not quite. https://www.law360.com/articles/757906/qvc-website-crash-suit-against-resultly-gets-trimmed https://www.law360.com/articles/757906/qvc-website-crash-sui... Basically, all damage claims are null because QVC & Resultly never entered into a mutual agreement. You can write whatever the fuck you want in your ToS but it's not law binding. > Judge Beetlestone also rejected QVC’s claims that Resultly violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act by knowingly and intentionally harming the retailer when Resultly caused the shopping network's website to crash, reasoning that the tech company and QVC both could only earn money if the site was operational. I see you are back on the FUD train surrounding web scraping but there's only very specific case where your fears materialize: "When you receive C&D from said website, do not continue scraping". Such was the case for Craigslist vs 3Taps. Please do not cite legal resources and grossly twist realities to spread FUD. If you don't want to be web scraped, simply do not put it online.

cookiecaper 10y ago
>Basically, all damage claims are null because QVC & Resultly never entered into a mutual agreement. You can write whatever the fuck you want in your ToS but it's not law binding. I'm pretty sure that's what I said re: the ToS? That's only one element of the case (breach of contract). You are correct that in this case, browsewrap was not considered applicable. There have been a few other cases where it wasn't too, as in Nguyen v. Barnes & Noble, Inc., but there have been cases where it was, as in Hubbert v. Dell Corp.. Also note that most cases re: browsewrap do not challenge the viability of automatically entering an agreement by clicking around the site, but rather argue that the notification was simply not prominent enough. It could be worked around by moving the notice into a more prominent location on the page. The other element is CFAA, and referring to the wide-open robots.txt helped Resultly establish that they were attempting to act in good faith and were not maliciously damaging QVC's systems and not exceeding authorized access to the computer system. >Please do not cite legal resources and grossly twist realities to spread FUD. If you don't want to be web scraped, simply do not put it online. I'm not trying to spread FUD, I'm just trying to make it clear that the legal situation is precarious. Google has clearly shown that if you are able to build your coffers and reputation faster than you can incur lawsuits, you can win on this. In fact, lots of big companies begin that way, and become big companies merely because they were lucky enough to get big enough to stand up for themselves before the legal threats started coming in the door. It's understood that you'll be scraped if you put it online. That doesn't mean scraping is legal. You may be confused here -- I'm not a publisher trying to stop people from doing this. I'm an entrepreneur whose business depended on scraping data from a specific source. That business got destroyed when they chose to dispatch their law firm against us. The point of repeatedly discussing this on HN is to make the legal situation clear so that people work to change it, and to make sure people who are going into similar ventures are informed about the legal risks associated with them. As I said on another post, I am not a lawyer, and this is according to my layman's understanding. No one should misinterpret my posts as legal advice. I'm not going to copy and paste this disclaimer into every post I make because it should be implicit, and a few IANAL disclaimers is plenty.
- brilliantcode 10y ago
  Well the difference is pretty clear between your case and the rest. Developers scraping a website isn't going anywhere. A business reliant on scraped data is making money off of it. That will lend you in precarious situation more. My criticism was that you mixed in service providers and tool providers that enable businesses to make money off scraped data-the vendor cannot be held responsible for misbehaving clients, the best it can do is cut them out when requested by external parties. Toyota doesn't appear as witness to vehicular man slaughter cases. It's a car to take you from A to B but it's not Toyota's fault if the customer runs over something between those two points and not it's intended design (QVC vs Resultly). It also doesn't help that there are pathological web scrapers who simply does not have the money to do anything fruitful so they will bootstrap using any means necessary and plays the victim card when they are denied. This particular group is responsible for majority of the litigations. People who otherwise have no business by piggybacking off somebody else using brute force to bring heat to everyone involved.
  - cookiecaper 10y ago
    >Well the difference is pretty clear between your case and the rest. Developers scraping a website isn't going anywhere. A business reliant on scraped data is making money off of it. That will lend you in precarious situation more. Developers presumably scrape websites because the data is of some value to them, frequently commercial value. Google's entire value proposition is based on scraped data, and it's one of the most valuable companies on the planet. The way the data is used is not necessarily relevant to whether the act of scraping a web page violates the law or not -- several more basic hurdles involving access, like the CFAA and potential breach of contract depending on whether the facts of the case are such that the court holds the ToS enforceable, have to be overcome before the matter of whether one is entitled to utilize the data obtained becomes the hinge. >My criticism was that you mixed in service providers and tool providers that enable businesses to make money off scraped data-the vendor cannot be held responsible for misbehaving clients, the best it can do is cut them out when requested by external parties. 3Taps is one of the most prominent such cases and it was just the type of tool that you're claiming wouldn't be held accountable. 3Taps's actual client was PadMapper, but since 3Taps was the entity actually performing the scrape, they were the party that was liable for these activities. The lesson we've learned from 3Taps is that scraping tools might be OK if they strictly observe any hint that a target site doesn't want the attention and cease immediately, but there's really no guarantee either way. Most people won't sue if you adhere to a C&D, not because they couldn't do so and win, but because it's much cheaper to send a C&D and leave it at that, as long as that settles the issue moving forward. Litigation is very slow and expensive.

cookiecaper 10y ago

>Basically, all damage claims are null because QVC & Resultly never entered into a mutual agreement. You can write whatever the fuck you want in your ToS but it's not law binding. I'm pretty sure that's what I said re: the ToS? That's only one element of the case (breach of contract). You are correct that in this case, browsewrap was not considered applicable. There have been a few other cases where it wasn't too, as in Nguyen v. Barnes & Noble, Inc., but there have been cases where it was, as in Hubbert v. Dell Corp.. Also note that most cases re: browsewrap do not challenge the viability of automatically entering an agreement by clicking around the site, but rather argue that the notification was simply not prominent enough. It could be worked around by moving the notice into a more prominent location on the page. The other element is CFAA, and referring to the wide-open robots.txt helped Resultly establish that they were attempting to act in good faith and were not maliciously damaging QVC's systems and not exceeding authorized access to the computer system. >Please do not cite legal resources and grossly twist realities to spread FUD. If you don't want to be web scraped, simply do not put it online. I'm not trying to spread FUD, I'm just trying to make it clear that the legal situation is precarious. Google has clearly shown that if you are able to build your coffers and reputation faster than you can incur lawsuits, you can win on this. In fact, lots of big companies begin that way, and become big companies merely because they were lucky enough to get big enough to stand up for themselves before the legal threats started coming in the door. It's understood that you'll be scraped if you put it online. That doesn't mean scraping is legal. You may be confused here -- I'm not a publisher trying to stop people from doing this. I'm an entrepreneur whose business depended on scraping data from a specific source. That business got destroyed when they chose to dispatch their law firm against us. The point of repeatedly discussing this on HN is to make the legal situation clear so that people work to change it, and to make sure people who are going into similar ventures are informed about the legal risks associated with them. As I said on another post, I am not a lawyer, and this is according to my layman's understanding. No one should misinterpret my posts as legal advice. I'm not going to copy and paste this disclaimer into every post I make because it should be implicit, and a few IANAL disclaimers is plenty.

brilliantcode 10y ago
Well the difference is pretty clear between your case and the rest. Developers scraping a website isn't going anywhere. A business reliant on scraped data is making money off of it. That will lend you in precarious situation more. My criticism was that you mixed in service providers and tool providers that enable businesses to make money off scraped data-the vendor cannot be held responsible for misbehaving clients, the best it can do is cut them out when requested by external parties. Toyota doesn't appear as witness to vehicular man slaughter cases. It's a car to take you from A to B but it's not Toyota's fault if the customer runs over something between those two points and not it's intended design (QVC vs Resultly). It also doesn't help that there are pathological web scrapers who simply does not have the money to do anything fruitful so they will bootstrap using any means necessary and plays the victim card when they are denied. This particular group is responsible for majority of the litigations. People who otherwise have no business by piggybacking off somebody else using brute force to bring heat to everyone involved.
- cookiecaper 10y ago
  >Well the difference is pretty clear between your case and the rest. Developers scraping a website isn't going anywhere. A business reliant on scraped data is making money off of it. That will lend you in precarious situation more. Developers presumably scrape websites because the data is of some value to them, frequently commercial value. Google's entire value proposition is based on scraped data, and it's one of the most valuable companies on the planet. The way the data is used is not necessarily relevant to whether the act of scraping a web page violates the law or not -- several more basic hurdles involving access, like the CFAA and potential breach of contract depending on whether the facts of the case are such that the court holds the ToS enforceable, have to be overcome before the matter of whether one is entitled to utilize the data obtained becomes the hinge. >My criticism was that you mixed in service providers and tool providers that enable businesses to make money off scraped data-the vendor cannot be held responsible for misbehaving clients, the best it can do is cut them out when requested by external parties. 3Taps is one of the most prominent such cases and it was just the type of tool that you're claiming wouldn't be held accountable. 3Taps's actual client was PadMapper, but since 3Taps was the entity actually performing the scrape, they were the party that was liable for these activities. The lesson we've learned from 3Taps is that scraping tools might be OK if they strictly observe any hint that a target site doesn't want the attention and cease immediately, but there's really no guarantee either way. Most people won't sue if you adhere to a C&D, not because they couldn't do so and win, but because it's much cheaper to send a C&D and leave it at that, as long as that settles the issue moving forward. Litigation is very slow and expensive.