Scraping a Website for Email addresses

[LarryDomain]

Hi,

I have a client that asked me if it was legal for them to have someone scrap a website for email addresses and business info. Then use that data on their own website. Has anyone had similar experiences with this?

Thanks for sharing.

 

[Silentptnr]

Waste of time. Most are masked. You can buy cheap data that is better than trying to scrape a bunch of sites.

 

[DU]

Hi,

I have a client that asked me if it was legal for them to have someone scrap a website for email addresses and business info. Then use that data on their own website. Has anyone had similar experiences with this?

Thanks for sharing.

What does that mean?

 

[Raymond C]

What is "scrape a website"? Steal a website?

 

[Braden Pollock]

Super common. Any online data that is public (non-firewalled) has been scraped 100 times - and the site owners know it. Any large database was created from scraping, - emails, reviews, real estate, etc, etc.

 

[LarryDomain]

What is "scrape a website"? Steal a website?

No stealing would be to copy the content completely. What my client wants to do is copy the queried records and use that data on her own website that's somewhat correlated to the original website having the data.

Example: Like downloading all the movie titles/actors from IMDB and listing it on your own website. Is this legal or illegal? Any thoughts?

 

[jberryhill]

What does that mean?

Great question.

 

[jberryhill]

Your client should speak to a lawyer.

 

[Gerard Hughes]

No stealing would be to copy the content completely. What my client wants to do is copy the queried records and use that data on her own website that's somewhat correlated to the original website having the data.

Example: Like downloading all the movie titles/actors from IMDB and listing it on your own website. Is this legal or illegal? Any thoughts?

Facts can't be copyrighted in the US, but US copyright law is complicated, so it isn't that simple. Europe, however, has database copyrights. Additionally, scraping data can be against a websites Terms of Service. When or whether that matters is something that is not clear cut. There have been cases either way. Google, for instance, downloads all the text on a website so it can search it on its own computers. Google mostly gets away with it, but gets sued over various aspects of its spidering, including over news content, especially in Germany and Spain. LinkedIn sued scrapers in 2016. You can't count on this being legal.

What do you have to lose? Literally. Check the specific facts of your case with an IP lawyer.

 

[MapleDots]

Example: Like downloading all the movie titles/actors from IMDB and listing it on your own website.

It depends where the website they are scraping it from scraped their information.
Does that even make sense?

Seriously though, everyone including google does it. Forums do it etc etc.
When I had my big forum I told members they could not copy and paste entire articles. They could paste the title, a maximum of 1 paragraph and then a link to the article on the website. Considering how large the site got we never had a single issue with this approach.

Pictures were different though, members thought they were free to post anything as long as there was a credit back. We soon found out that was not the case when getty images started sending us demands to pay thousands per image. I think they billed us in the hundreds of thousands because they bought out all the small image websites and then claimed to own the images. I just ignored them because being in Canada I never figured anything would come of it and I was correct.

So I would say headlines with a bit of an intro.... so bits and pieces with a link back is probably ok. The webmaster would probably thank you for the traffic. Of course anything as complete content would be considered theft.

 

[LarryDomain]

maybe a simpler example.

Someone owns Dentist.com and has a listing of all the dentists in the country. Another person now has DentistS.com and wants to setup a similar directory by scraping the data off the first website since it's already available (this is public data, company name, address and phone number).

The original Dentist.com has no copyright or trademark to their website. Not even terms of service.

This happens all the time but is it legal or illegal?

 

[Gerard Hughes]

maybe a simpler example.

Someone owns Dentist.com and has a listing of all the dentists in the country. Another person now has DentistS.com and wants to setup a similar directory by scraping the data off the first website since it's already available (this is public data, company name, address and phone number).

The original Dentist.com has no copyright or trademark to their website. Not even terms of service.

This happens all the time but is it legal or illegal?

It is not as simple as "legal or illegal". Again, you need to talk to an IP lawyer. With some aspects of copyright, whether something is legal or not is complicated and can only be settled by expensive lawsuits based on the specifics of your case. Fly by night companies with no assets can get away with it because they are judgement proof and can disappear. Big companies can get away with it because they can afford to fight all the way to the supreme court. You and your client, on the other hand...

Keep in mind that, mostly, anybody can sue you for anything. The question is no so much whether or not they can sue, but whether they can win. And that can depend on how much you can afford to pay. So legal or illegal may be only part of what you need to consider. The other is could somebody sue you, and if so, how likely is it? And if they do can you afford to fight the suit, or, if you loose, pay the judgement.

IANAL. So if my observations are wrong, and they could be, then you *really* should have consulted a lawyer

 

[consumers]

The original Dentist.com has no copyright or trademark to their website

I am not sure what you mean by this. I think you are talking about trademark and copyright notices which is not the same thing as an actual copyright or trademark.

 

[jberryhill]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_in_compilation

 

[Gerard Hughes]

I am not sure what you mean by this. I think you are talking about trademark and copyright notices which is not the same thing as an actual copyright or trademark.

Quite.

But, if accurate, the lack of copyright notices seems odd and unprofessional. It sounds a bit like LarryDomain's client wants to scrape Sketchy Site A to make and profit off of Sketchy Site B, but I can't really tell from the information offered so far.

 

[clicknowmarketing]

Facts are facts and if you put up a database of movies or dentists, there is nothing wrong with that. Let's say you had a dentist directory site and you looked at your competitor and saw a listing for a new dentist that you didn't have on your site. There is nothing wrong with taking that information and including it in your own database. They don't own that information. That example is on a micro level however

The competitor's database is bound to have mistakes and possibly false listings they have placed there on purpose. If your database contains all of these mistakes and false listings, they can make a pretty strong case that you copied the entire thing.

Your best bet would be to scrape Yelp or Yellow Pages and use that information. We do that constantly but we use it for internal purposes, we don't go and republish it. You should research some of the other scraping lawsuits that other people in this thread have mentioned.

At the end of the day, I doubt you would be doing enough scraping that would catch their attention and you can just use rotating proxy servers anyways. It would be almost impossible to prove you were the one scraping it and who is to say you didn't just manually go and look at the information.