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by gitaarik 97 days ago
Interesting point. I've been looking into a similar issue recently, and for example LinkedIn won a lawsuit against the analytics company hiQ because they violated their ToS for scraping their website. And I think they also never technically had a direct contract they'd breach.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HiQ_Labs_v._LinkedIn

1 comments

Yes, but I think that there is a big difference. In the case you linked, hiQ were actually doing the scraping themselves.

People (or company? not sure) don't make any requests to Anthropic themselves. They just publish code that can make such requests.

I don't think that there is a legal precedent that would make publishing code that can do scraping illegal.

Yeah good point. I think if the scraping code is written specifically for a site / system that prohibits scraping through it's ToS, the company has an edge for a lawsuit. It's a bit of a gray area I think. It depends how much of a threat you form to the company you're scraping, and how big the company is.