9th Circuit holds that scraping a public website does not violate the CFAA [pdf]

Post by jjohansson » Tue, Sep 10, 2019, 4:00 AM UTC

dangero wrote: post #167

kabacha wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean it should. That is also a huge anti-competitive action that just isn't pursued by anyone yet: google makes money of scraping and denies scrapers scraping them - that's all sorts of messed up. The problem is that someone would have to sue google first and no one will do that unless there's big business incentive and big business can already scrape the shit out of google. This is the weird thing about web-scrapi…

Google only scrapes sites that allow it by their robots.txt file so I don’t think their policy is as hypocritical as you are making it sound.

Post by ddingus » Tue, Sep 10, 2019, 4:01 AM UTC

sezna wrote: post #172

kabacha wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However, how is it reasonable to force a web site to serve its contents to a third-party company, without being allowed to make a decision whether to serve it or not? Your statement makes absolutely no sense. That's not how internet works. If you serve something publicly you don't get to cherry pick who sees it. Not only it makes no sense technically it's also a huge anti-competitive case.

It makes sense and it is how the internet works. Servers cherry pick who sees their content all the time. Scrapers are often blocked, as are entire IP address ranges. Things like Selenium server scrapers can be (approximately) detected and often are denied access. I’m not sure about being anti-competitive. Serving a website is an action in which you open up your resources for others to access. My friend runs an open…

Post by megablast » Tue, Sep 10, 2019, 4:05 AM UTC

txcwpalpha wrote: post #69

admax88q wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lol really? I'm not "on" your site when I browse there. I asked your server to send me some data and it did so. Its real life equivalent to social engineering. Its so far not illegal for me to ask you things and for you to disclose them to me even if you weren't supposed to. I'm allowed to lie to you even to persuade you to tell me things.

You didn't "ask my server". You used a tool to extract data from my server. It's more akin to you standing just outside my property border and using a fishing pole to pull fish from a pond that is inside my property border. You're still trespassing even if your two feet aren't physically on my land. The common legal argument (see the second link in my above comment) is that accessing a web server actually does consti…

Post by aledalgrande » Tue, Sep 10, 2019, 4:12 AM UTC

skybrian wrote: post #169

penagwin wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like this is a really common theme I've seen several times. Something like "Music Lyric site X sues Google for embedding their lyrics in the results directly" which is funny because site X got the lyrics by scraping them from other sites. Plus Google only exists from scraping content, but I believe their TOS includes "don't scrape our content". I find it really funny that the scrapers are battling scrapers - l…

Google respects robots.txt, so it's arguably not the same as scraping a website without their consent.

Post by jsgo » Tue, Sep 10, 2019, 4:29 AM UTC

jecxjo wrote: post #163

tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not allowing the CFAA to be (ab)used to attempt to make scraping illegal makes sense. However, how is it reasonable to force a web site to serve its contents to a third-party company, without being allowed to make a decision whether to serve it or not? Serving the web site costs money, and the scraper surely isn't going to generate ad income...

Isn't the issue of being selective on who can view the content? If I, random Joe User views the publicly available content you have no issue. But if someone scrapes that data them you'd want to charge them. Unless I click on the ad, the act of using your bandwidth doesn't change based on who the viewer is. You'd want to apply fees based on the future use of the data rather than on your actual costs.