Ask HN: How Are Webhose or Newsapi Legal?

[shoe_hn]

They crawl news articles from site like CNN, FOX,... and serve them via an API for a fee. Isn't this a textbook case for copyright infringement? Does simply following robots.txt, as they claim, give you automatic immunity against copyright infringement?

I'm curious as I would like to create a similar service and am seriously concerned about the legal side of things.

[entelia09]

IANAL but I'm 99% sure they are not legal. They are just too tiny to be sued into oblivion. At the moment.

[perfect_loop]

This is a recipe for disaster.