Is Data Scraping Legal? Everything You Need to Know
Businesses involved in web scraping encounter this question on every possible platform. Our answer to this common question — is it legal to collect web pages using automated scripts? Yes, absolutely!
Scraping means retrieving content from web pages automatically, as opposed to manually opening each page in a browser. The requests made by a browser agent to the target server hosting the web page are similar to a bot visiting the page to obtain its content.
Why is scraping with scripts considered taboo among those who have just learned to use this term? Mainly because it is often used contrary to site policy and violates basic data scraping rules.
Here are a few rules to follow if you want your bot to behave like a human.
- Robots.txt — think of it as a filter and a form of consent that you must follow if you plan to crawl a site. It tells you which URLs you can or cannot visit. This rarely depends on the bot — even Google bot cannot scrape a blocked page unless the site cares about that page's SEO.
- Public content — collect only publicly available content, keeping copyright policy in mind. If a script only visits a site to reproduce the same content on a new site, good luck!
- Terms of Service — check the site's terms of service and make sure everything is okay between you and the site.
- Authentication-based sites — some sites require authentication before you can access their content, and in most cases this prevents scraping because they want only real people to log in.
- Crawl delay — robots.txt also specifies a delay between successive requests, if any, to ensure you don't hammer their servers. If you overload them with requests, there's a chance your IP will be blocked.
If you have followed all the above points and are still looking for trouble-free scraping, let's consider why scraping became possible in the first place:
- Website content is made public to reach a wide audience. The larger the audience, the more expensive the advertising. Scraping only amplifies this phenomenon if it follows the above rules.
- Some sites store huge volumes of information that are difficult to process manually, so (as with all other technological interventions) a scraping bot's intervention is necessary.
- Many companies today grow based on data they collect from many other companies (think of data scraping and analysis). Although they haven't made deals with each of these website hosts, they built or rented a complex tech stack in-house to obtain diverse data. This process has always helped new companies enter the market.
Conclusion: website scraping is not a secret activity. It's just another way of collecting data that requires significant intelligence.
P.S. We are not lawyers, and this post is based on our limited knowledge of scraping, which is an integral part of our big data solutions provided to clients.