Re:Web Scraping and Crawling Are Perfectly Legal, Right? (2017)
by jjeaff on Tuesday July 30, 2019 @09:57PM
(#20571092)
Seems like that would have the undesirable effect of making large corporations untouchable by anyone except the government and other large corporations.
If you want to sue a big company for treating you poorly, you risk a very high price of you lose.
Re:Web Scraping and Crawling Are Perfectly Legal, Right? (2017)
by yub on Tuesday July 30, 2019 @11:34PM
(#20571516)
That’s the point of the American Rule - every side pays their own way.
Re:Web Scraping and Crawling Are Perfectly Legal, Right? (2017)
by RichEO on Wednesday July 31, 2019 @12:16AM
(#20571683)
That only holds if the laws allow the large corporation to treat people unfairly.
Re:Web Scraping and Crawling Are Perfectly Legal, Right? (2017)
by icebraining on Wednesday July 31, 2019 @07:30AM
(#20573434)
Even if the law is fair in 99.9% of the cases, if that 0.1% means you're on the hook for more than you can afford, it's rational not to risk it.
While you rarely, if ever, see cases where losing parties have to pay millions - I personally haven't seen any like that - you can see people having to pay tens to lower hundred thousand $ in legal fees.
That can be a substantial sum for regular people, and those circumstances happen when the other party has hired in high-$$$ lawyers, and the case goes on for a while. Especially if there's multiple appeals.
So there's always the risk of that.