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by funstuff007 1156 days ago
> a service exposes some capability without authentication, ergo you're authorized to use it

How is this different from scraping publicly available websites? i.e. why would you get in trouble for one, but not the other?

2 comments

It's not different in any way. "Corporation doesn't like it when you do it" is apparently the number one cause of "trouble". Especially in the US where they can bankrupt you with legal fees even if they have no actual leg to stand on. Less so in other countries.
Who's getting bankrupted by legal fees over scraping these days--which has time and time again be declared not illegal.
Anyone can be bankrupted by corporations over literally any bullshit claim. They can afford to lose in court and still win because their objective never was to win in the first place, it was to burn your money through legal fees. It's essentially abuse of the legal system by the rich to keep the poors in line.

Big companies with deep pockets will even bankrupt other companies this way. For an example, look at how Sony sued playstation emulator companies over the most bullshit claims possible, got an injunction, killed their profits and then it didn't matter that they lost in court afterwards. In my country, the judge would have estimated the profits the smaller player lost as a result of Sony's frivolous lawsuit and forced them to pay it all back on top of the legal fees.

Yes, your examples make sense in their own context, but are not relevant to the case of scraping publicly available data.

In short, who's getting put out of business for redisplay or derived data uses of publicly available data?

Because the offense turns on intent, not on a simple factual case you can rattle off on a message board.