As an "early" programmer playing with web scraping with the Nokogiri gem, I've been wondering about this aspect (although haven't encountered it yet).
Are there legal implications to scraping a site that actively tries to prevent bots from scraping it? I mean, if the data is publicly accessible on the web, could they go after you?
I don't plan on doing this for any malicious reasons or anything, and like I said, I haven't encountered it yet. Just having the "what if" thought of what my legal risks might be if I'm playing around with this and whether a site could come after me.
> Are there legal implications to scraping a site that actively tries to prevent bots from scraping it? I mean, if the data is publicly accessible on the web, could they go after you?
When we do projects, the baseline is if Google can see it we can too. So from a legal standpoint if Google is covered so are we.
From a legal standpoint firms do go after web scrapers. And lose more often than not. The exception is when you're logged in when you crawl. In that case you've implicitly accepted the terms of use. Some companies aggressively sue when you're logged in while scraping, so it's best to stay on the safe side. Further reading on the topic:
Are there legal implications to scraping a site that actively tries to prevent bots from scraping it? I mean, if the data is publicly accessible on the web, could they go after you?
I don't plan on doing this for any malicious reasons or anything, and like I said, I haven't encountered it yet. Just having the "what if" thought of what my legal risks might be if I'm playing around with this and whether a site could come after me.