Web Scraping Legality

This cluster centers on debates about the legality, ethics, and implications of web scraping public websites, including TOS violations, copyright concerns, and precedents like LinkedIn v. hiQ, often contrasting with Google's practices.

📉 Falling 0.5x Legal
4,132
Comments
20
Years Active
5
Top Authors
#7111
Topic ID

Activity Over Time

2007
10
2008
38
2009
41
2010
91
2011
74
2012
209
2013
126
2014
151
2015
119
2016
158
2017
314
2018
154
2019
294
2020
354
2021
294
2022
328
2023
538
2024
426
2025
373
2026
40

Keywords

RAM NY US CPU AWS galvanilegal.com robots.txt TOS AI IMO scraping scrape scraped data copyright tos illegal bot web robots txt

Sample Comments

chasing0entropy Dec 21, 2025 View on HN

Google claims Only they are allowed to scrape data for profit!

pabs3 Sep 27, 2025 View on HN

Is non-AI-related scraping now legal too?

spoonmonkeyuk Nov 16, 2012 View on HN

Why not? Because of liability to law suits for breach of the terms of service or copyright violation. Third parties have been sued for scraping in the past.

edm0nd Feb 2, 2019 View on HN

While it is a TOS violation is this data being scraped really hurting anything? I dont think so.

jazzyjackson Jul 27, 2021 View on HN

When is it illegal to scrape a website?

twistedanimator Jun 22, 2012 View on HN

Why would scraping their site be illegal?

LunaSea Jul 10, 2019 View on HN

Wouldn't that be considered illegal due to the same reasons as scraping?

tpmoney Aug 26, 2022 View on HN

Because scraping a public website is different from breaking into adobes private source control servers?

imglorp Oct 3, 2025 View on HN

Seems there is a scraping precedent already, set by Linkedin v HiQhttps://www.fbm.com/publications/what-recent-rulings-in-hiq-...

robertlagrant Dec 6, 2020 View on HN

That's cool. How does it work with website Ts & Cs, which generally don't like scraping?