My Reddit AMA on the Law of Web Scraping

djoldman

This one made me chuckle: > This breaks my students’ brains. If it’s so ubiquitous, it must be clearly legal…right? Do they not drive? Driving slightly faster than the speed limit is ubiquitous in my experience.

wand3r

Honestly interesting article and general topic. As with most things it depends on who you are. If you are Spotify, Google, OpenAI or Anthropic, its fine. As mentioned, this is why gray areas and unsettled laws are so malicious. They protect the rich and powerful and can be used to absolutely destroy regular people. It is adjacent to scraping, but Aaron Schwartz is a good example. He faced decades in jail for what is effectively best practice for an LLM data pipeline

999900000999

Once I was at a company which both had agreements to rehost certain content, and scrape the significant amount. A couple of funny things happened, once we were clearly being blocked and my manager wanted me to figure out a way to evade said blocking. And in another case we ended up getting scraped ourselves. Which was absolutely hilarious. I think we were able to resolve this by just contacting the website host. I am not a lawyer, but a lot of things in America are almost 100% dependent on how much money you want to spend suing or defending yourself in court. There are a lot of VC funded companies who more or less just scrape and resell data. If LinkedIn and few other places figure out how to actually block them , they'd be out if a business.

dadarahulshaik

If scraping is legal, so should distillation

armchairhacker

The recent DOSs are not scraping. You can scrape a website running on a hobbyist home server without inconveniencing it, even 1000 people daily can. The AI "scrapers" sending multiple requests per second (even per day) to every imaginable URL (vs. sitemap.xml or robots.txt) should be more accurately called DOSers, and are intentionally malicious and/or ridiculously incompetent.