> Better to ask beforehand, many websites are quite happy to hand you data If they say "no", what then? If it was within your rights to scrape the data, and yo

> Better to ask beforehand, many websites are quite happy to hand you data If they say "no", what then? If it was within your rights to scrape the data, and you go ahead and do it anyway, then you're going to (a) look like a jerk, and (b) if the company is litigious, they're going to use this as evidence that you knew what you were doing was wrong. I'm not saying that you shouldn't ask, but pointing out that there are sometimes downsides to asking.