Since the early 2000s, the most important federal law governing web scraping in the United States has been the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (“CFAA”). For host websites that wanted to stop scraping, the CFAA has been the go-to legal remedy to threaten web scrapers. For the first time since the law was enacted in … Read More
The first rule of the law of web scraping is this: Details matter. As I’ve written before, there are dozens of laws associated with web scraping. As such, no single “three-part test” can tell you whether what you’re doing is legal or not. The only way to properly assess that is to look into the … Read More
Facebook aggressively monitors web scraping on its platforms. And they aren’t shy about sending out cease and desist letters when they believe someone is violating their terms of service. After the Ninth Circuit’s decision in hiQ Labs, Inc. v. LinkedIn Corp. in 2019, however, there might have been some question whether a court (and, in … Read More
Date of Last Update: July 20, 2023 When I first published this guide, in the summer of 2020, I wrote that the recent trend had been toward greater permissiveness with web scraping. That sentence isn’t as true today as the day when I first wrote it. Recent policy trends have wavered. The few jurisdictions where … Read More