Re:Congrats! Web scraping is legal! (US precedent)
by mindcrime on Wednesday January 29, 2020 @10:50AM
(#22181806)
The arms race would intensify, and detecting/blocking/deceiving scrapers might become a lucrative field.
It already is. There are entire companies, like Distil Networks, who exist solely to protect companies from bots/scrapers/etc. Actually, looks like Distil got acquired and are now part of Imperva, but anyway, the idea is the same. This is definitely an existing field.
Disclosure: former Distil employee, but I have no financial stake in this discussion, and have mixed feelings about scraping. Clearly it can be beneficial in some situations, but when I think about having to pay exorbitant prices to scalpers for tickets to an event, because they used a bot to buy up all the tickets, that is less appealing.
It already is. There are entire companies, like Distil Networks, who exist solely to protect companies from bots/scrapers/etc. Actually, looks like Distil got acquired and are now part of Imperva, but anyway, the idea is the same. This is definitely an existing field.
https://www.imperva.com/products/bot-management/
Disclosure: former Distil employee, but I have no financial stake in this discussion, and have mixed feelings about scraping. Clearly it can be beneficial in some situations, but when I think about having to pay exorbitant prices to scalpers for tickets to an event, because they used a bot to buy up all the tickets, that is less appealing.