| Disclaimer, I wrote the article. > I'm not fond of the implication at the end that scraping is justifiable because old websites are dinosaurs without APIs, and those websites are jerks for not doing so, and therefore scraping is the moral thing to do. It was not my intention to give that implication. The main implication behind CityBikes is that public services should already provide this information since, well, it is a public service. On the same line, a private company providing a public service should already do so. See motives [1]. > I've scraped my share of BuzzFeed data and Foursquare data to make data visualizations (with the latter explicitly saying "don't scrape" in their Terms). But if either one told me to stop and take down my results, I would not contest, since data is what drives the Internet ecosystem. Same as CityBikes is doing. If we receive a cease and desist, we remove their service from our API. As for Foursquare, I do not see Foursquare as a public service. Your taxdollars at work, and all that. I tried to keep the article balanced but maybe it wasn't clear. There are many transportation companies willing and happy to be scraped, or looking forward to provide their information for people to reuse [2]. [1]: https://blog.scrapinghub.com/2016/03/30/web-scraping-to-crea... [2]: http://nabsa.net/current-members/ |