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Slightly offtopic, but what are the legal implications of crawling a public website and building a derived service like this? I know it's usually considered gra
by amuresan 11y ago
Slightly offtopic, but what are the legal implications of crawling a public website and building a derived service like this? I know it's usually considered gray area, but are there any clear limits? What does it take to build a legally stable business around scraping public content?
Citation from the Patreon Terms of Use on the public area:
"
Without limitation, you may not:
13. Use a robot, spider, manual and/or automatic processes or devices to data-mine, data-crawl, scrape or index the Service in any manner.
"
- markovbling 11y agoWould love to hear replies on this - just because it's against their terms of use, does that mean it's illegal? Just because someone says they don't want you to look at them and write down what you see doesn't make it illegal. Of course it might be stalking / harassment in the legal sense but where's that line for spidering websites?
- lucaspiller 11y agoIt depends on your local laws and where you and the other website (well, the legal entity of) are based. As an example if you are both based in the UK the website could probably bring civil charges (i.e. sue you) for breach of contract, or even attempt to bring criminal charges under the Computer Misuse Act for unauthorised access to a computer system. If the website is in the UK, and you are in China it's probably not worth the effort.
- Axsuul 11y agoIt's my hope that PledgeSociety provides more value and brings more exposure to their platform in exchange for some of their bandwidth. I think it's a fair tradeoff :) I would prefer to use an API but they don't have one!