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by stefan_ 1574 days ago
It can be legal for you to scrape something yet very illegal to reproduce it.

This applies even more when the site you scraped didn't have permission to show the data in the first place. Their mistake does not rise to be your permission; if it was my data, I would have as much a claim against you as them. "The software did it" is not an excuse.

2 comments

The software didn't do it, indeed. The custodians of the data who allowed private data to be made public did it.
I'm assuming the owner of this site has permission to reproduce court documents from each source, generally these types of documents are public record and can be reposted. It sounds like whoever configured this portal where the public can view documents misconfigured it and allowed for private documents to be shown, without any indication that they were supposed to be private.