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Taking action against scraping for hire

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Re: Taking action against scraping for hire

#81

Post by smt88 »

blantonl wrote: post #70
iandanforth wrote: post #59

Collecting the rhetorical BS: "scraping attacks" Scraping is not an attack. Monopolists want to pretend they own your data because they get unlimited access to monetize it whereas competitors should have none. "self-compromised" Monopolists want to sell you thus it's imperative they maintain the fiction of "one person, one account". By admitting you own your account, they'd have to allow sharing and they wouldn't be…

Quoted post unavailable.

I don't sympathize with a monopoly that people are trying to weaken.

I loathe Meta and want to boycott it. Unfortunately this means I'm now locked out of the only repository of most local events and gatherings in my city.

In some countries, life is literally not possible without WhatsApp.

If Meta wants to cry about the mean bullies trying to exfiltrate data, they need to stop wiping out competitors.

Re: Taking action against scraping for hire

#82

Post by blantonl »

samsoftstuff wrote: post #74

It's like they don't know that courts just made it legal: https://techcrunch.com/2022/04/18/web-scraping-legal-court/

"Legal" doesn't make it ethical, nor does it shield you from liability if you willfully violate contract law (terms of service)

Re: Taking action against scraping for hire

#83

Post by ConstantVigil »

jmyeet wrote: post #63

I'm torn on Web scraping because the extreme of each end of the spectrum on this issue both seem unreasonable. On one side, you have people who say any form of scraping is be disallowed, even prosecutable. This went so far that the Department of Justice on behalf of AT&T prosecuted a case of URL modification [1]. One of the few bright spots for this psychotic Supreme Court was to curtail the government's power under…

> So much about this case is ridiculous, and it’s complicated by the fact that nearly everyone agrees that weev is a world-class jerk. But, you need to separate that out from the details of what he did here, to note that it was nothing particularly special, and it involved the sort of thing that security researchers do all the time, and which all sorts of non-security researchers do quite often.

Yeah... uhm... I used to do exactly this sort of thing...

When I was a teenager, I would look at the URL of whatever site I was on, and would change a number here, or a letter there; and see what I got.

Sometimes you get nothing, sometimes you get something. Sometimes that something is quite interesting.

Re: Taking action against scraping for hire

#84

Post by jhoelzel »

closewith wrote: post #41
Raed667 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Violation of ToS does not mean a violation of the law.

Most law suits aren't due to breaches of the law, but breaches of contract. Whether terms of service constitute an enforceable contact is another matter.

if a bot creates the account, who breaches the contract?

Re: Taking action against scraping for hire

#85

Post by sneak »

blantonl wrote: post #70
iandanforth wrote: post #59

Collecting the rhetorical BS: "scraping attacks" Scraping is not an attack. Monopolists want to pretend they own your data because they get unlimited access to monetize it whereas competitors should have none. "self-compromised" Monopolists want to sell you thus it's imperative they maintain the fiction of "one person, one account". By admitting you own your account, they'd have to allow sharing and they wouldn't be…

Quoted post unavailable.

> the vast majority of Web scraping efforts are to build businesses on top of other organizations hard work and innovation.

Not really. Scraping just gets data, not code, so it's hard to support this argument. The anti-scraping view is that the right to use the data rests with the company that collected it, but I don't think that view is held by most people.

Re: Taking action against scraping for hire

#86

Post by kordlessagain »

blantonl wrote: post #70
iandanforth wrote: post #59

Collecting the rhetorical BS: "scraping attacks" Scraping is not an attack. Monopolists want to pretend they own your data because they get unlimited access to monetize it whereas competitors should have none. "self-compromised" Monopolists want to sell you thus it's imperative they maintain the fiction of "one person, one account". By admitting you own your account, they'd have to allow sharing and they wouldn't be…

Quoted post unavailable.

I've reread the previous comment and I really don't see where there is any justification stated for acting in an unethical manner. While Facebook may be making an argument against unethical behavior by a few, using the language they do is detrimental to legitimate uses of crawling content available on the Web.

Corporations, by nature, work in a way that individuals at those companies don't. They are literally "non-corporal" entities and work toward increasing profit and stakeholder value, not improving the lives or situations of their users, unless that happens to correspond to making them more money.

We should all be wary of corporate control and claim to rights built from their user base, especially if those services are offered for "free".

Re: Taking action against scraping for hire

#88

Post by sneak »

jhoelzel wrote: post #84
closewith wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most law suits aren't due to breaches of the law, but breaches of contract. Whether terms of service constitute an enforceable contact is another matter.

if a bot creates the account, who breaches the contract?

The person who ran the bot. Programs do not have agency, they are just tools.

That's like saying "If the gun fires the bullet, who is liable for murder?" It's a silly question.

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