Is it legal to scrape websites? The Law and Myths of Web Scraping

Web scraping, also known as data extraction or data scraping, is a way of obtaining structured data in a spreadsheet or database from unstructured HTML data using intelligence automation approaches.

Data extraction from the internet can be legal or criminal. Extraction of publicly available data is not illegal. In other words, you can scrape any data on the web as long as the data is publicly available and you are not breaching the terms and conditions of the website you are targeting.
Let's delve into the topic to learn more about the legality and myths surrounding web scraping.

What Are the Common Web Scraping Myths?

There are several typical myths and misconceptions concerning scraping and data extraction that we frequently hear in most interactions.

Myth 1: Web scraping is prohibited.
Web scraping is not illegal as long as it does not violate the rules and regulations of a specific location. In a nutshell, it depends on a variety of aspects, including how you acquire data from websites. What kind of information are you collecting? What will you do with the extracted data? It is not prohibited if you certify that you are not infringing the regulations of your targeted website.

Myth 2: Web scraping is the same as hacking.
Web scraping is the act of obtaining data from publicly available websites on the internet. Web scraping is not the same as hacking, because hacking is the act of accessing information from another computer without authorization.

Myth 3: You must be able to code in order to scrape data from the web.
We can scrape information from the web even if we are not competent programmers. As online scraping services or tools, many organisations today offer specially created software to scrape important information from websites. These technologies enable users to gather information as needed. Among these tools is newsdata.io, which allows users to extract news data via its News API. Newsdata.io also offers a free plan for testing the tool's functionality.

Myth 4: Web scrapers steal information.
Web scraping simply refers to obtaining data that is freely available on the internet, whereas data theft refers to gathering information or data that is not visible to everyone. Web scrapers collect information from the internet that is freely available to everyone.

Myth 5: You can scrape any website or web page.
Webpages have various controls and standards in place to prevent bots from scraping data directly from the page. A web scraper or scraper bot should not break the terms and conditions of a webpage when scraping and should avoid collecting information that is not publicly accessible.

Myth 6: Web scraping and web crawling are interchangeable.
Web crawling is the process through which web crawlers, also known as spiders or search engine bots, explore web sites to index content from all over the internet by following connections in order to give relevant information to users based on their needs and queries. These search engine bots are mostly utilised by major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing, among others.

Data Extraction or Scraping, on the other hand, is the process of retrieving structured data using intelligence automation approaches.

How Do We Prevent Illegal Scraping?

There is nothing wrong with extracting data that is freely available on the internet, but you must avoid using protected material without the owner's permission because it will be considered criminal.

Here are some rules on unauthorised web scraping:

1. Infringement on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)
2. Contract Breach Copyright Infringement
3. Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) Violation
4. Trespassing, for example.

You are in the safe zone if you are not attempting to obtain prohibited information or data. Terms and conditions vary by location; you must be conscious of where and whose data you are scraping.