Linkworthy: Scraping as a Legal Minefield
By Jonathan Bailey • Aug 24th, 2006 • Category: Articles, DMCA, Legal Issues, Linkworthy
While doing research for a comment I posted, I ran across a very interesting link entitled "Website Spidering and Scraping: A Legal Minefield" by Jorge L. Contreras, Jr. and Nader Mousavi of WilmerHale.
The link is interesting in that it talks about all of the ways scrapers can run into legal trouble including statutes covering computer fraud, trespass to chattels, breach of contract and copyright law.
It also offers some of the best legal advice I've seen for preventing scrapers, namely putting them on notice with a well-written terms of service that prohibits scraping.
This page relates directly to previous articles I've written about Scrapegoat, how Grokster might apply to scraping and a future article I am finishing off about Dapper.
Anyone who is dealing with scraping needs to take a look at this article as it offers several great alternatives to attack scrapers beyond simply using copyright law and the DMCA.
tags: Plagiarism, Content+Theft, Copyright+Infringement, DMCA, Copyright, Scraping, Scraper
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Jonathan Bailey is The Webmaster and author of Plagiarism Today, which he founded in 2005 as a way to help Webmasters going through content theft problems get accurate information and stay up to date on the rapidly-changing field. He is also a consultant to Webmasters and companies to help them devise practical content protection strategies and develop good copyright policies.
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[...] But as stated previously, the legality of scraping depends less on copyright issues and more on other matters including trespass of chattels, TOS violations and computer fraud/abuse. This is why unwanted scraping has been called “a legal minefield“. [...]
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