It would be very good to have one or a few solid legal decisions relating to scraping. Today, as far as I know, the entire segment is still in limbo. It is im

It would be very good to have one or a few solid legal decisions relating to scraping. Today, as far as I know, the entire segment is still in limbo. It is important to understand that, legal or not, in the US anyone can sue you for anything. In another comment people were discussing the legality of following or ignoring "robots.txt". I tend to be pragmatic about this stuff. If you fabricate your own legal interpretation and end-up being sued by LinkedIn, it could end-up costing you $250K. When facing large corporations law firms often ask for sizable retainers ($100K+) and proof of cash-on-hand to go beyond that, $250K total not being an unusual number. They don't do this out of greed. They do it because litigation at those levels can be very expensive. If you only have $100K you could find yourself burning through all of it quickly. If you don't have more cash to continue you'll lose the lawsuit and the $100K you spent will be burned for no reason at all. In other words, the law firm is protecting you by asking you to have enough cash to litigate. A few years ago we started to develop a very extensive product based on obtaining data from Amazon. Some of the data is available through their API and other data had to be scraped in various forms. The product is extremely valuable yet the issues pertaining to scraping made me decide to put it on hold. Even if you can make millions a year the prospect facing a monster like Amazon in a lawsuit, as improbable as it might be, is scary enough to go look for other pastures.