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> If you don't sign the contract nobody can sue you for violating it. But terms of service are contracts which you sign by agreeing. Courts have looked somewh
by nkozyra 19d ago
> If you don't sign the contract nobody can sue you for violating it.
But terms of service are contracts which you sign by agreeing.
Courts have looked somewhat favorably on "I didn't read that" defenses, but accepting the agreement is a legal contract between you and the service provider.
- stymaar 19d agoMy point is that you don't have to accept anything.
- nkozyra 19d agoSure. But then you don't get credentials and can't scrape.
- lazide 19d agoEven if you get the credentials via middle man?
- stymaar 19d agoYou keep saying that but unless company start doing KYC there's absolutely no link between auth and ToS. The authentication mechanisms used by websites don't have a specific legal power, it's just a POST request among other GET requests sent during scraping. And we have jurisprudence saying scrapping is legal no matter what the ToS of the website says, because the scraping entity never signed up the contract. The only protection against scrapping that auth is giving you isn't a legal one, it's a technical one (you can detect and ban the scraping user account).
- cuu508 19d ago*scraping