[Autogenerated] crawling and scraping are subject to a lot of controversy,
and there's always questions around if they are legal or _______.
To some extent, I am by new means legal expert on the topic.
However,
there are few things I would like to mention and
bring up that I think are important.
That will give further insights on this technology.
From a concept point of view.
Crawling and scraping are not _______ by themselves.
After all, you can always crawl and scrape your own websites.
If a website is yours and you own that content,
you can also extract data from it by using a
combination of crawling and scraping.
If, for example,
on the world's largest retailer and I lose all my database
servers and all I have left is my website.
To get back all the data, I would have to scrape it off my own website.
As this data is mine, it wouldn't be _______ to scrape it off my own site,
So why could things go wrong?
Problems may arise when you are crawling for the sake of scraping someone
else's website to obtain their data without written permission.
After all,
it's their data before you scrape off the data from someone else's website.
Make sure you have read and understood the terms of services of the
website where you plan to get the data from so disregarding those terms
of service might come with some future legal consequences when scraping
data off a website which is not yours.
So what can happen if you don't obtain permission to scrape off someone
else's website and this regard their terms of service?
The party who owns the website that you are scraping without
obtaining permission and with total disregard to their terms of
service might come up with some actions.
They could simply choose to ignore you even if they notice what
you are doing and if what you are doing has no impact or
disruption to their normal operations.
But what happens if you cause an impact to their operations?
They might choose to ban or block you,
so essentially your script can become completely useless.
And if what you're doing has a bigger impact,
they might even find out who you are and where you are from by tracking
your i p address and send you a cease and desist letter,
which at the stage their legal department is already involved.
If their legal department is on the case,
then there's nothing in reality that can prevent them from suing you.
They own their site, and they might think you are a threat to their operations.
In that case, it might be already a bit too late,
and this usually might come with some strings attached.