3 ms·

> as an owner you are legally allowed to disallow service to anyone without having to provide a reason as a website owner you absolutely have the right to limi

> as an owner you are legally allowed to disallow service to anyone without having to provide a reason as a website owner you absolutely have the right to limit who does or doesn't visit your site, but that's up to you to enforce. Scraping is literally equivalent to reading a giant public billboard and writing what it says somewhere else. How could that be illegal?

nickjj 7y ago
> Scraping is literally equivalent to reading a giant public billboard and writing what it says somewhere else. How could that be illegal? If you treat the website you're visiting as a privately owned business then you're trespassing on private property by scraping their site, assuming that site is trying to prevent that behavior. If you don't treat the website as a privately owned business, then what do you classify it as? It can't be considered in the public domain because someone owns, operates and pays for the resources to make the site work. It is the site owner's private property IMO. By having the site public, they are inviting the world to check it out but they should have the right to disallow service. Also, if the internet is supposed to be distributed and each site is an independent node on the system, how is that any different than an independently owned brick and mortar business operating in some location? In this case the physical world is "the internet". It's not a clear cut thing, and I hate the idea of censorship, but I can't see this case's outcome becoming the norm. There's too many loop holes. Like, is going to your site 50 thousand times a second hoping to get new information from the public billboard a legal move? Or, to put it another way, I'm pretty sure if you were able to mind control people and you commanded a billion people to flood a physical business so that it could not operate and serve its customers this would be quickly seen as an unlawful move in the physical world. You would probably get shut down by the state or government too for disrupting service for neighboring businesses and citizens.
- antisthenes 7y ago
  You treat it as a public-facing building storefront, with you standing outside and taking pictures. As long as there are big glass windows, the patrons and the information gained from looking inside are not subject to privacy, and are thus freely accessible to anyone walking by. What you're not entitled to is the backend workings of the website - the application/code/databases, and credentials. It would be akin to going into a restaurant and forcing yourself into the food prep area and stealing the owner's keys, and contaminating the food that patrons eat. Scraping too often would be something akin to setting up a camera tripod right in the building entrance, hindering the influx of new customers. While not explicitly illegal, it does hinder the operation of the business, and you will probably be physically removed at some point (this is banning abusive bots, etc.)

nickjj 7y ago

> Scraping is literally equivalent to reading a giant public billboard and writing what it says somewhere else. How could that be illegal? If you treat the website you're visiting as a privately owned business then you're trespassing on private property by scraping their site, assuming that site is trying to prevent that behavior. If you don't treat the website as a privately owned business, then what do you classify it as? It can't be considered in the public domain because someone owns, operates and pays for the resources to make the site work. It is the site owner's private property IMO. By having the site public, they are inviting the world to check it out but they should have the right to disallow service. Also, if the internet is supposed to be distributed and each site is an independent node on the system, how is that any different than an independently owned brick and mortar business operating in some location? In this case the physical world is "the internet". It's not a clear cut thing, and I hate the idea of censorship, but I can't see this case's outcome becoming the norm. There's too many loop holes. Like, is going to your site 50 thousand times a second hoping to get new information from the public billboard a legal move? Or, to put it another way, I'm pretty sure if you were able to mind control people and you commanded a billion people to flood a physical business so that it could not operate and serve its customers this would be quickly seen as an unlawful move in the physical world. You would probably get shut down by the state or government too for disrupting service for neighboring businesses and citizens.

antisthenes 7y ago
You treat it as a public-facing building storefront, with you standing outside and taking pictures. As long as there are big glass windows, the patrons and the information gained from looking inside are not subject to privacy, and are thus freely accessible to anyone walking by. What you're not entitled to is the backend workings of the website - the application/code/databases, and credentials. It would be akin to going into a restaurant and forcing yourself into the food prep area and stealing the owner's keys, and contaminating the food that patrons eat. Scraping too often would be something akin to setting up a camera tripod right in the building entrance, hindering the influx of new customers. While not explicitly illegal, it does hinder the operation of the business, and you will probably be physically removed at some point (this is banning abusive bots, etc.)