Ask HN: News scraping APIs – how are they legal? I had a project I was working on that required a sort of news feed. A quick google search turned up a few news apis. They seem to scrape news sites and turn them into JSON, then charge for the feed. YC even funded one of them! I'm curious about how this is possibly legal. If it is legal, it would of course be cheaper for me to simply scrape the website I need instead of paying one of the apis. |
That's the business model of those APIs; for a segment of their customers it's cheaper to outsource the scraping to them than do it in-house.
As far as legality goes, it's in a bit of a grey area. What you do with the data is also a major factor, regardless of how the data was obtained, and I would argue this is more important than the "how" - forget republishing stories verbatim on your website, regardless of whether you're getting them via API, scraping, or manually copy/pasting. Other usages might be more permissible, and some might be totally fine for example. Keep in mind that the API provider doesn't have to be legal either - they could be anonymous or based somewhere out of reach of the US legal system and thus couldn't care less about any potential legal consequences.