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Discussion on: WebScraping [Part-1]

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cubiclesocial profile image
cubiclesocial

It's against IMDB's Terms of Service (ToS) to scrape their content. Not that their ToS has actually stopped anyone in the past from scraping their site, my response was just to point out an alternative to scraping their content that doesn't violate their ToS.

Scraping websites of private entities is a legal minefield. U.S. government websites, however, are completely legal to scrape as all of the content on them is in the public domain and they usually have data worth scraping that's more up-to-date than what shows up on data.gov. There are also massive multi-petabyte public datasets on Amazon S3 available too that require the use of a scraper toolset to properly retrieve and process (e.g. commoncrawl.org/the-data/get-started/) but that might be a tad more advanced than a beginner's tutorial might be able to cover.

Anywho, just a couple of thoughts.

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mefaba profile image
AW A RE

Any public data is legally scrapable by law. And it should remain legal.

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cubiclesocial profile image
cubiclesocial

Terms of Service are unsigned contracts unless you sign the contract by doing something like create an account and agree to the ToS. Then contract law may apply and "no scraping" clauses in such contracts might be legally binding. I'm not a lawyer but the law is a lot more complex than you think and each region of jurisprudence is different in how it applies its own laws. Your blanket assertion that scraping anything published on a website is legal is false. If someone has to login to obtain content (i.e. agree to a ToS) or they knowingly obtain content that is known to be sourced via illegal means, then civil or even criminal actions can be taken against that person.

Legal issues aside, web server operators can also block those who make excessive requests to their servers. IMDB has official data dumps of their database. It's not perfect since some information is missing but it is a good enough starting point for most purposes. Since IMDB makes data dumps available for direct download and is more efficient than scraping, IMDB has every right to block anyone scraping their main website.