Well the difference is pretty clear between your case and the rest. Developers scraping a website isn't going anywhere. A business reliant on scraped data is making money off of it. That will lend you in precarious situation more.
My criticism was that you mixed in service providers and tool providers that enable businesses to make money off scraped data-the vendor cannot be held responsible for misbehaving clients, the best it can do is cut them out when requested by external parties. Toyota doesn't appear as witness to vehicular man slaughter cases. It's a car to take you from A to B but it's not Toyota's fault if the customer runs over something between those two points and not it's intended design (QVC vs Resultly).
It also doesn't help that there are pathological web scrapers who simply does not have the money to do anything fruitful so they will bootstrap using any means necessary and plays the victim card when they are denied. This particular group is responsible for majority of the litigations. People who otherwise have no business by piggybacking off somebody else using brute force to bring heat to everyone involved.
>Well the difference is pretty clear between your case and the rest. Developers scraping a website isn't going anywhere. A business reliant on scraped data is making money off of it. That will lend you in precarious situation more.
Developers presumably scrape websites because the data is of some value to them, frequently commercial value. Google's entire value proposition is based on scraped data, and it's one of the most valuable companies on the planet. The way the data is used is not necessarily relevant to whether the act of scraping a web page violates the law or not -- several more basic hurdles involving access, like the CFAA and potential breach of contract depending on whether the facts of the case are such that the court holds the ToS enforceable, have to be overcome before the matter of whether one is entitled to utilize the data obtained becomes the hinge.
>My criticism was that you mixed in service providers and tool providers that enable businesses to make money off scraped data-the vendor cannot be held responsible for misbehaving clients, the best it can do is cut them out when requested by external parties.
3Taps is one of the most prominent such cases and it was just the type of tool that you're claiming wouldn't be held accountable. 3Taps's actual client was PadMapper, but since 3Taps was the entity actually performing the scrape, they were the party that was liable for these activities.
The lesson we've learned from 3Taps is that scraping tools might be OK if they strictly observe any hint that a target site doesn't want the attention and cease immediately, but there's really no guarantee either way.
Most people won't sue if you adhere to a C&D, not because they couldn't do so and win, but because it's much cheaper to send a C&D and leave it at that, as long as that settles the issue moving forward. Litigation is very slow and expensive.
You can be sued (and lose) for damages incurred by illegal activity whether the aggrieved party sends a notice or not. It's not the plaintiff's job to let you know you're breaking the law, and they're entitled to damages whether you know you're breaking the law or not.
In fact, it's assumed that defendants weren't intentionally breaking the law, which is why when it's clear that they were, courts triple the actual damages for willful violations. [0]
If a reasonable person wouldn't realize that they were "exceeding authorized access", that probably limits a potential CFAA claim, but that's it, and that's not only the potentially perilous statute when you're a scraper. In the QVC case, Resultly got lucky that QVC did not have an up-to-date robots.txt; otherwise, they very well may have been on the hook for multiple days of lost online revenue, despite their immediate cessation upon receipt of a C&D.
Again, you are more than welcome to take your perspective and run with it, and it's plausible that no one will get mad enough at you to sue over it. That doesn't change the law.
I would assume that 3Taps pursued this litigation not because they had special love for PadMapper, but because they felt it was important for their business to be allowed to scrape major data sources and thought they'd be able to win. Pretty sure Skadden was their law firm so they gave it an earnest try, but ultimately lost.
You can be sued for crossing the street. You can be sued for flipping the bird and someone happens to get aneurism from it. You can be sued for writing what you just wrote!
Yes, but if you fight it adequately, you won't lose. If you get sued for scraping, it's quite likely you'll lose, as the law has numerous pitfalls for scrapers, including things as basic as regarding RAM copies as infringing.
My criticism was that you mixed in service providers and tool providers that enable businesses to make money off scraped data-the vendor cannot be held responsible for misbehaving clients, the best it can do is cut them out when requested by external parties. Toyota doesn't appear as witness to vehicular man slaughter cases. It's a car to take you from A to B but it's not Toyota's fault if the customer runs over something between those two points and not it's intended design (QVC vs Resultly).
It also doesn't help that there are pathological web scrapers who simply does not have the money to do anything fruitful so they will bootstrap using any means necessary and plays the victim card when they are denied. This particular group is responsible for majority of the litigations. People who otherwise have no business by piggybacking off somebody else using brute force to bring heat to everyone involved.