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Legal Monetize

What is legal: scrape, or scrape & sell, or code a scraper

Which of the following is illegal:
(1) Scrape emails from a site and send one email to each address.
(2) Scrape emails from a website and sell them.
(3) Make a scraping script and sell it without using it.
Note: The target website Terms of Use (ToU) state that no one can crawl/scrape it.

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New European e-communication regulations and web scraping

GDPR-eu-rulesGeneral Data Protection Regulation or GDPR: enforcement date – 25 May 2018. The GDPR covers the matter of online user data privacy rules for electronic communication and data protection. The regulation includes modern communication messengers and services, eg. Skype, Viber, Gmail, etc., that have not been previously mentioned in the former EU e-communication directives.  

“Privacy is guaranteed for content of communication as well as metadata (e.g. time of a call and location) which have a high privacy component and need to be anonymised or deleted if users did not give their consent, unless the data is needed for billing.”

See the infographic on GDPR or the main elements of GDPR in EU.

Categories
Legal

US court stated scraping, even when against TOS, is legal

court_smallLast 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.

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How to alarm of your site being illegally scraped

Have you encountered the issue of your site being scraped and your online content being infringed? Yes, you’ve warned your content abuser with no response or you have received just some excuses. But, after Google indexing, your content does not stick out of the similar content heap of stolen material in search results? What can one do to set an alarm and enforce some consequences or even punishment?