[rootusrootus]

I know a guy at Nike that had to deal with a similar problem. As I recall, they basically gave in -- instead of trying to fight the scrapers, they built them an API so they'd quit trashing the performance of the retail site with all the scraping.

[matheusmoreira]

Yes. That's exactly what everyone should do.

[cbsmith]

Well, not EXACTLY. The exactly should be to just do WebSub/PuSH. No need to invent your own thing and hope that bots learn how to use it properly.

[matheusmoreira]

Agreed. What I mean is people need to stop fighting these pointless battles.

[echelon]

If data is your competitive advantage or product, then what? Accept that your market no longer exists and that there's no way to stop theft?

[ianbutler]

You're going to need to explain how scraping publicly available information on a website is theft.

If information is your competitive advantage maybe you shouldn't have it on a publicly accessible website, and should instead stick it behind an API with pay tiers and a very clear license regarding what you may do with it as an end user.

Note, a simple sign up being required to view a website makes it not publicly available information any longer and you can cover usage, again, in a license.

Then you have a whole bunch of legal avenues you can use to protect your work. Assuming you can afford it that is.

[emodendroket]

How practical is this really though? Like, imagine you're a newspaper. Unless you're the FT or Wall Street Journal or something like that, nobody is making an account to read an article. They'll just go somewhere else.

[simondotau]

> You're going to need to explain how scraping publicly available information on a website is theft.

Seriously? Do I need to explain why a song doesn’t enter the public domain when it is played on the radio?

[matheusmoreira]

Do I need to explain that copyright is practically unenforceable in the 21st century? Data is trivially copied and there's nothing you can do to fight that, no amount of laws will ever make it non-trivial again. Even if you successfully sue somebody for this, it won't stop them.

At some point people are gonna have to accept this.

[nickff]

>"Do I need to explain that copyright is practically unenforceable in the 21st century?"

This sentence added nothing substantive to your comment, and made it rude; could you please be a bit more polite in the future?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[simondotau]

I was responding to a question of whether it was theft, not whether such theft is morally grey or unstoppable in practice.

Yours is a somewhat orthogonal point and one I don’t entirely disagree with.

[echelon]

What are copyright strikes, then?

[throwawaygh]

OP was talking about price lists. IANAL but AFAIK you can't copyright a list of prices.

[simondotau]

That may be true. A list of prices might not be copyrightable in your particular jurisdiction. However I was only responding to the raw assertion made without any such qualification.

On the opposite end of the spectrum might be a photographer's website containing a gallery of their sample work. The fact that the gallery is openly published doesn't represent a relinquishing of copyright over those images.

[Grimm1]

No but those are substantively different situations such that this exact thing is being argued in the highest courts of the US. It's not quite the cut and clear case you seem to believe it to be.

[simondotau]

I'm not American. I'm interested to read about these cases. Can you point me towards some relevant material, or at least cite the case name(s)?

[cbsmith]

No, but there is a legit philosophical argument about theft when it comes to copyright. There are two ways to look at theft: acquiring something you didn't earn vs. someone losing something they did earn. Generally, we tend to focus on the latter. From that perspective, "copying" is really not "theft", and arguably "copyright" does more net societal harm than any benefit it provides.

[achillesheels]

It is copyright information, no? So technically it is intellectual property theft if the scraping use is for commercial purposes.

[rmbyrro]

Not all information falls under copyright.

If you build a database of touristic places and display in your website, the information is not protected by copyright.

In Europe they have laws covering _sui generis database rights_, but they are from another era and unenforceable nowadays.

[Grimm1]

No? If you place information publicly on a website it's pretty much free game, no copyright violation, especially regarding user generated information. That's my take, but legally it's a gray area and it's still going back and forth in the courts (at least in the US) but for a while before a decision was vacated by the supreme court scraping publicly available information on a site was legally protected and seemingly inline with my thoughts on it.

[achillesheels]

If we are to live in a mutually prosperous society, how is the labor and therefore well-being of the content creator improved by a web scraper? Does this precedent not injury future opportunities for exercising one’s life to making website data available for others to scrape?

By my understanding any website with a copyright disclaimer warrants their data as exclusively their own and are granting permission for other web users to generate it, ie people are not entitled to share their web data with anyone. So if they are, and we agree that it’s good that they do, and continue to create information for others to know, how do we avoid the implicit harm in extracting data without nothing being given in return but possibly harming the internet’s experience for everyone accessing the same information?

[chadwittman]

The real Jedi move

[wrycoder]

Especially if you charge for it, which would save them money, because they wouldn't have to redo their code every time you changed your website.

[gonzo41]

I think there's an opportunity for a new JS framework to have something like randomly generated dom that will always display the page and elements the same to a human but constantly break paths for computers.

Like displaying a table with semantic elements, then divs, then using an iframe with css grid and floating values over the top.

This almost seems like a problem for AI to solve.

[blueboo]

Even if your DOM is obfuscated, the rendered page remains vulnerable to OCR. Obfuscate the rendered pixels and you’ll annoy your humans and eventually find that the scrapers’ OCR is superhuman.

Still, maybe AI comes into it. Maybe poisoning the data is the right way to do it conditioned on ML-juiced anomaly detection.

[Lifelarper]

pdf and print newspaper is still a massive pain in the ass to OCR accurately

[rootusrootus]

To some extent those already exist and I get annoyed by them when they cause 1Password to be useless on their login page. But it probably would help with algorithmic scraping.

[zarzavat]

This is already common. It's mildly annoying for scrapers but generally a waste of time since you can usually still orient yourself based on the content of the nodes.

[ghusbands]

This would have huge accessibility issues, breaking screen readers and the like.

[kall]

We already have react-native-web (<3), so we have that covered.