US Court: Web scraping is legal

How ironic that $bn tech companies are the ones complaining about this.

"Several companies, including Facebook, Instagram, Parler, Venmo and Clubhouse have all had users’ data scraped over the years."

What about when Amazon crawls the web every day to scrape pricing data from other retailers so they can undercut prices? Guess that's ok. Or when Facebook (meta) drops cookies to track your browsing history and then sell your personal data. Now all of a sudden they care about "users' data".

Don't get too excited yet. This article doesn't say that web scraping. It's only saying that that web scraping isn't illegal yet. Once the trial is over, that's when the rulings will go into effect.

Does anyone remember (Aaron Schwartz)[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz]? This ruling didn't come early enough to save him, but hopefully the issue of web scraping's legality is a done deal soon.

I will say, though, web scraping does require (I think) hitting a website multiple times to get it's info. That's gotta be somewhat in the grey I imagine.

Many of us have business models based around scraping. This is really significant news. Here's the key paragraph:

In its second ruling on Monday, the Ninth Circuit reaffirmed its original decision and found that scraping data that is publicly accessible on the internet is not a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, or CFAA, which governs what constitutes computer hacking under U.S. law.