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Are you suggesting that mere scraping alone would demonstrate sufficient intent to warrant prosecution? Can you elaborate? Various courts have had mixed interpr
by biot 14y ago
Are you suggesting that mere scraping alone would demonstrate sufficient intent to warrant prosecution? Can you elaborate? Various courts have had mixed interpretations on the enforceability of sites' terms of service. How would this impact the body of case law that has been building around automated scrapers such as the many "... vs Google" cases? Also, "precedence" is ranking something in priority; "precedent" is the legal term.
- danielweber 14y agoThere was a case where a company successfully got an injunction against a scraper that got pricing data, arguing that the scraper violated the federal unauthorized access statute. http://itlaw.wikia.com/wiki/EF_Cultural_Travel_v._Explorica http://itlaw.wikia.com/wiki/EF_Cultural_Travel_v._Explorica This is an area of law that is evolving rapidly so there may be other cases that supersede that one.
- tptacek 14y agoThe indictment goes into great detail as to how Swartz would have known his actions violated JSTOR's terms, and how he repeatedly took surreptitious steps to continue his plan despite the obvious efforts of both MIT and JSTOR to stop him. "Mere scraping alone" is unlikely to land you a federal charge; the prosecution needs to demonstrate your intent to act unlawfully. A far more typical outcome for a scraping case is a C&D from the site you scraped. For obvious reasons, JSTOR can't C&D Swartz once their content hits BitTorrent. Similarly, if you scrape a site and post it to file sharing networks, you might have something to be concerned about.