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Is web scraping legal and ethical?
Lecture: The legal and ethical side of web scraping. This is a summary in our own words, not legal advice.
Step 1: read robots.txt first
A site's robots.txt says what it allows. Hacker News disallows some paths and asks for a crawl delay of 30 seconds.
What we gained: we check the rules before we scrape, and we keep our requests rare: this project fetches one page per run.
The rules we follow
- Public data that is not copyrighted is generally fine to read. The cases Genius v. Google and hiQ v. LinkedIn show that the line is not simple.
- Copyrighted content, such as videos or blog posts, must not be copied. Data behind a login is covered by the site's user agreement.
- Commercial use of scraped data can lead to costly disputes even when the scraping itself was allowed.
- Prefer an official API, respect
robots.txt, send aUser-Agentand do not send more than one request a minute.
What we gained
Scraping is a technical skill with legal and ethical limits. Knowing the limits is part of doing it well.