Is web scraping legal ?

The answer to the question "is scraping legal" is not a simple yes or no.
Indeed, it strongly depends how you extract the website and how you plan to use the data -either collected manually or using automated infrastructures.

Webscraping helps drastically improve the productivity of countless types of activities, if you respect some good practices:

• If you collect data from external websites, you have to respect their "Terms of use" and Copyright details, which determine how their respective data can be accessed and used. This can easily be found on their home pages. Thus, the collected data should not be displayed as your own or collected if it not allowed. As stabler.tech only provides the bot software and lets users deploy their own infrastructure, you are responsible for the good respect of these rules.

• Our bots are an automated method to extract data, and can be much faster than any human-based data collection method. As such, we make sure in our technologies that web scraping processes mimic random human behavior and do not affect the performance of extracted websites. On your side, while you set up your infrastructure -and especially the volume and frequency of extractions- you are responsible for the good measure while carrying out the extraction.

Webscraping practices are increasingly becoming part of standard business operations. The upcoming EU laws on pricing control implicitely invite e-commerce companies to deploy webscraping infrastructure to prove pricing accuracy and relevance. Moreover, over the past few years, many courts have confirm that web scraping does not violate laws against hacking :

• https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/09/web-scraping-doesnt-violate-anti-hacking-law-appeals-court-rules/
• https://gizmodo.com/federal-appeals-court-rules-that-duh-scraping-public-d-1837999165
• https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/10/20859399/linkedin-hiq-data-scraping-cfaa-lawsuit-ninth-circuit-ruling
• https://techcrunch.com/2024/01/24/court-rules-in-favor-of-a-web-scraper-bright-data-which-meta-had-used-and-then-sued/?guccounter=1

While using our stabler.tech tools, we will ask you to use proxy servers, so that you never connect directly to websites using your own IP adress. This will enable you extract data anonymously. This will also enable you to locate yourself from any country, which can be also useful for testing purposes.

At stabler.tech, we take this crucial question seriously and are in permanent contact with a dedicated, specialized legal team to monitor any signifiant change in the legal framework.

Feel free to contact us if you wish to receive more information.