Month: April 2018

Last month a legal case took place in a US court where four professors plus a media organization sued the US Government. The District Court for the District of Columbia conclusion stated that moderate scraping, even when against ToS, is legal.

A district court in Washington, D.C. has ruled that using automated tools to access publicly available information on the open web is not a computer crime — even when a website bans automated access in its terms of service (document). The court ruled that the notoriously vague and outdated Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) — a 1986 statute meant to target malicious computer break-ins — does not make it a crime to access information in a manner that the website doesn’t like if you are otherwise entitled to access that same information.

Before we put down all the legal statement fine details, we better give you a conclusion derived from the law case.
If you do not read all the legal statement fine points, jump right to the conclusion.