31–40 of 84 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the data is made available to me as a human, then I am free to delegate the job of retrieving it to a machine if I choose, and I will be doing it whether you like it or not.
Unfortunately "whether you like it or not" doesn't carry much legal weight.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It would prevent the legal case from ever taking place, ideally.
The service provider will just block Tor.
My point is, you can’t just put content online and expect to put restrictions on how I send the HTTP requests for it on my side. And if you think you can well I’ll do my best to prove you wrong.
Edit: I totally agree that the data they’re giving me is their property and I merely have a license to use it. I’m not advocating for copyright infringement or anything like that. But if the license allows me to use the content for X purpose, then the way I request the content (whether through a browser or a scraper) shouldn’t matter.
What is HN’s opinion on the legality of these types of scrapers? Instagram’s robots.txt disallows this kind of scraping, same for their ToS. Legal precedents have been mixed - the recent LinkedIn vs HiQ case is a good signal, but it’s still in appeals court.
What is HN’s opinion on the legality of these types of scrapers? Instagram’s robots.txt disallows this kind of scraping, same for their ToS. Legal precedents have been mixed - the recent LinkedIn vs HiQ case is a good signal, but it’s still in appeals court.
My opinion is basically that since businesses use machines to target, communicate, and attempt to influence me, they have no right to deny my ability to do the same, unless it harms their service e.g. DDoS.
Want to show me an ad? Have an actual human being manually pick the ad in real time and deliver it to me!
What is HN’s opinion on the legality of these types of scrapers? Instagram’s robots.txt disallows this kind of scraping, same for their ToS. Legal precedents have been mixed - the recent LinkedIn vs HiQ case is a good signal, but it’s still in appeals court.
If the data is made available to me as a human, then I am free to delegate the job of retrieving it to a machine if I choose, and I will be doing it whether you like it or not.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the data is made available to me as a human, then I am free to delegate the job of retrieving it to a machine if I choose, and I will be doing it whether you like it or not.
Unfortunately "whether you like it or not" doesn't carry much legal weight.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
IMO scraping like this is shady at best. That said, however, there's no straightforward way to work with Instagram. It's original APIs are both limited and locked down. The new Facebookified APIs are limited and next to impossible to work with (they are geared exclusively to ads/marketing). So ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ In a side project I use a library that effectively reverse-engineers Instagram's private API, pretends it's a user…
can you provide a link or source for that ? TY
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The service provider will just block Tor.
And there are plenty of other proxies to choose from. My point is, you can’t just put content online and expect to put restrictions on how I send the HTTP requests for it on my side. And if you think you can well I’ll do my best to prove you wrong. Edit: I totally agree that the data they’re giving me is their property and I merely have a license to use it. I’m not advocating for copyright infringement or anything li…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My opinion is basically that since businesses use machines to target, communicate, and attempt to influence me, they have no right to deny my ability to do the same, unless it harms their service e.g. DDoS.
Exactly. Want to block non-humans from automatically accessing your content? OK, then i will block non-humans from deciding what ads to show to me. Want to show me an ad? Have an actual human being manually pick the ad in real time and deliver it to me!
What is HN’s opinion on the legality of these types of scrapers? Instagram’s robots.txt disallows this kind of scraping, same for their ToS. Legal precedents have been mixed - the recent LinkedIn vs HiQ case is a good signal, but it’s still in appeals court.
FB and LinkedIn both scrape contacts (and who knows what else), from their users email accounts (and surely lots of other darker sources as well). Pretty much all of Google's search engine's content is scraped from other websites.