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> "I'm genuinely confused about the legality about building a business whose sole purpose is to scrape the web, repackage and sell that information" Like Googl
by hodgesmr 12y ago
> "I'm genuinely confused about the legality about building a business whose sole purpose is to scrape the web, repackage and sell that information"
Like Google?
- meritt 12y agoExactly. I am very much on the side of "If it's publicly available info, it's free to access and repackage" but a lot of companies and judges feel otherwise.
- ZoF 12y agoCan you list some specific examples of companies to whom this pertains? By that I mean companies who think their data shouldn't be publicly available and also fail to place a no-crawl flag in their robots.txt.
- meritt 12y agoWell, a robots.txt (much like an implicit TOS/EULA that nobody ever sees nor agrees to) isn't exactly legally binding. Yelp, LinkedIn, and Craigslist are examples that have taken legal action recently against other entities scraping and re-purposing the data.