Web Scraping and Crawling Are Perfectly Legal, Right?

Re:Web Scraping and Crawling Are Perfectly Legal, Right? by wolco on Wednesday April 19, 2017 @10:33AM (#14147952)

I don't fully understand the tos of services clause or how that woman won a lawsuit. If that were common wouldn't I be able to put a similiar notice and start collecting payments. I would think everyone would do that causing a decline in visiting random sites.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Web Scraping and Crawling Are Perfectly Legal, Right? by bbernard on Wednesday April 19, 2017 @12:43PM (#14149143)

The way it works was not immediately clear to me either.

If you go to her website: http://profane-justice.org/profane-justice.org/ (yep, you have to enter this weird URL)

At the bottom, it's stated that if you copy anything, you enter into a contract, and that for each page copied, you owe her money. This is how it works.

I don't think that such clauses are common on websites, probably because:

  1. People don't know that they can do that.
  2. People don't have the patience, energy and financial resources to sue everyone copying things from their personal websites.

So yes, you could put something like this on your website. But let's be honest, this isn't good for the "free" and "open" internet that we all want.

[ Parent | on HN ]