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
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#7111
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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?