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The Supreme Korean court says that scraping publicly available data is legal
- PigiVinci83 4y agoOther news on web scraping world at https://thewebscraping.club/p/a-brief-wrap-up-of-the-latest-news https://thewebscraping.club/p/a-brief-wrap-up-of-the-latest-...
- bobthepanda 4y ago> The Supreme Court held that the Defendants did not access an unauthorized or restricted information network and found Defendants not guilty of violating the Information Protection Act based on the following findings: (i) there was no objective evidence showing that access to Yanolja’s API server was restricted or that Yanolja has implemented any technical measures blocking unauthorized access; (ii) Yanolja’s general terms of use was clearly applicable to registered users only; (iii) Yanolja’s general terms of use did not prohibit use of packet capture and scraping, which was used by Defendants; (iv) Yanolja’s API server was accessible via mobile app and a PC web browser; and (v) there was no reason to restrict access to Yanolja’s API server, as it was not used for storing valuable business information. I am not a South Korean lawyer (or any lawyer), but basically this just means you do have to actually put effort into restricting access to information if you want to sue someone over illegally accessing it, right?
- mikeryan 4y agoThe US Supreme Court has actually called this a Gate Up/Gate Down approach and that if anyone can get in at any time the Gate is down. This is in respect to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. It seems the Korean Courts have affirmed this right as well.
- danso 4y agoI wonder if the Korean ruling cited SCOTUS as a reference point
- olliej 4y agoI would kind of hope not - that would imply that they were considering US laws as in someway relevant to Korean law.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- threatofrain 4y agoThe US references legal happenings from abroad.
- hugh-avherald 4y agoIt's common for courts around the world to regard the decisions and reasoning of foreign courts as having good persuasive authority, even if they're not technically binding. Naturally, this is even more the case if the law is nearly identical across borders (as through trade agreements).
- throwaway14356 4y agoit should be mandatory for law makers. If other countries spend millions figuring stuf out you should at least have to explain what is wrong about it
- beachy 4y agoSo you're saying the rest of the world should be obliged to study SCOTUS reversing roe vs Wade when making their own abortion legislation?
- drewrv 4y agoAbsolutely. Train wrecks should get studied to find out what went wrong.
- throwaway14356 4y ago
- jahewson 4y agoGate up = open, gate down = closed. It’s echoing a medieval portcullis.
- mikeryan 4y agoHah! Good to know.
- mirkules 4y agoWhat are some examples of this? E.g. if a website is free but requires an account to access (i.e. valid email address), is it still considered publicly accessible or not?
- jffry 4y agoI do not know for sure either way, but my assumption is that it would be different if you must create a user account and in the process agree to terms of service that prohibit scraping.
- markdown 4y agoAccording to the Korean Supreme court, if it requires an account to access, then the TOS applies. In this instance, an account was not required to access the data, therefore the TOS did not apply. > (ii) Yanolja’s general terms of use was clearly applicable to registered users only;
- munk-a 4y agoPoint 3 seems the most restrictive to the applicability of this ruling - it sounds like everyone's TOS is likely going to be updated with a clause prohibiting packet capture and scraping.
- anigbrowl 4y ago
- retcore 4y agoThis is very old hat. A friend battled the old British Telecom, after Deutsche Telekom (the rest crumbled after that) to publish Telex businesses directories a whole couple of generations ago. Copyright laws protect the structure and occasionally(via trade dress usually) formatting of your data. But common sense informs this entire oeuvre of issues that if the utility of the information that you are working with is inherently extant ion openness then the judiciary will politely post you a clue and the check. Utility forms a considerable amount of legal doctrine in so called intellectual property(which is a fallacious misnomer introduced into the lexicon purely for purely self serving reasons only very recently). Infringing a unused order poorly exploited patent and the registration owner sues? No fear because you're going to have to pay fair royalties and be allowed to carry on unless you been some kinda jerk. This is all about the appropriation of the basic infrastructure for human life. Yet the amount of misunderstood and very elementary (Googleable) law passing debate without comprehension is much more frightening than this moot threat, it indicates nearly complete cooption of principal values of human development.
- intrestingstuff 4y agomy approach: if it's on google, it can be on my website
- spullara 4y agothat is too restrictive. robots.txt isn't the law.
- michaelmior 4y agoIt's not, but why ignore the express wishes of website owners?
- wahnfrieden 4y agoout of disrespect for IP
- stickfigure 4y agoThe EULA of this HN comment requires you to deposit $2 in my bank account upon reading. Why are you ignoring my wishes?
- jacquesm 4y agoWhat is your bank account?
- michaelmior 4y agoBecause that is a false equivalency. And also, you never responded with your bank info.
- a1369209993 4y agoWhich why they rightly did not say "if and only if".
- jayzalowitz 4y agoI mean sure, but the law of dont be a dick and the world isnt a dick to you applies.
- recycledmatt 4y agoDo scrapers all proxy out of Seoul now?
- spullara 4y agoScraping is legal in the US as of a few years ago. https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/technology/pages/scraping-public-data-from-linkedin-is-legal.aspx https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/technology/...
- krzyk 4y agoThat ruling is not surprising. Just affirming comon sense. Without it e. g. Web search would not be possible.
- armchairhacker 4y agoI think the bar to whether something is an "illegal data breach" or not, should be whether the security is half-decent according to most security researchers. Because in cases like these (and the one where someone almost got arrested for clicking "view source"), the vast majority of security researchers will agree that the security was terrible and irresponsible. Even scraping public data could be a gray area e.g. if you're scraping a huge amount of possible addresses or de-aggregating on a massive scale. More importantly, you could say that you are doing this, e.g. claim that you found a "secret" 64-bit key by evaluating every possible one. But if your data is accessible via simple API requests, clearly there is limited "guessing" or brute-force going on.
- 323 4y agoTech people applaud this, but then they are all upset when someone collects 100 mil Facebook/... public profiles.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- mgliwka 4y agohttp://haveibeenscraped.com/ http://haveibeenscraped.com/
- kelnos 4y agoThat's quite the broad brush you're painting with. We should all understand that if you post something that's public, it's... public.
- drewrv 4y agoI think it's reasonable to believe that public information should be accessible, and also be upset that things you expect to be private were made public.
- johnnyanmac 4y agoI feel my stance is the same. If I can take out a pen and paper and write down the information I see on my screen, I see no reason not to have a computer perform a similar function. Granted, I hope a decade and generation born into social media has learned all these lessons about being careful about what you post, at least compared to when this was novel teaching material in my high school. But then again, they may also think Snapchat is ephemeral enough, so jury's out
- ctocoder 4y agothere is going to be a lot of scrapers running out of South Korea :)
- exysle 4y agoIn other words, you can build a Korean 'Google' today by scraping Google.
- KMnO4 4y agoGood luck. Legal precedent has exactly zero impact on Google’s fair use policies. You’ll get throttled, and then banned before you get your first customer.
- bobthepanda 4y agoWell, the ruling says you can’t have it legally enforced if you don’t put any effort into it, but Google definitely puts effort into blocking scrapers. Also, Koreans mostly use Naver as their search engine.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ss108 4y agoSupreme Korean Court has a rather different vibe from Korean Supreme Court
- martin82 4y agoOn the one hand, I do think that scraping should be legal, on the other hand, I maintain a lot of websites and scrapers are a gigantic pain in the ass that make hosting a popular site for normal people cost-prohibitive (you need to scale up servers or invest engineering time to prevent scraping). This can only lead to a more centralised web where only rich people can afford to host content. There needs to be a solution like some kind of internet metadata archive, distributed on IPFS or something where bots can get their data if they want.
- account42 4y agoWith what kind of sites do you see this as as a problem and what level of traffic do you get from these scrapers? There was a discussion [0] 11 days ago about this concerning a search engine, but for many other websites you can just pre-generate almost all of the content and use microcaching to cover anything that has to be dynamic to drive the per-request cost to almost 0. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32339314 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32339314