Ask HN: Legality of price comparison scraping without permission

5 points by aik48 13 years ago | 3 comments

I'm building a price comparison website that allows users to buy the product without leaving my site. Is this legal to do? All the sites have standard EULA that says all content is property of site and cannot be used for any other purposes. We haven't asked them to use their content.

We're just going to be scraping the prices though. Not even the names/descriptions/images the sites use. We're using our own for that. Does this fall under the protection provided by Feist v. Rural? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_v._Rural)

jasonparallel 13 years ago |

From my reading of Rural, anything that is a fact is not covered by copyright protection. If you have to register a account to use for scraping things could get a little dicey.

I'm not a lawyer (so this is not legal advice) but I have looked into it for my own projects and decided I had a minimal risk.

debacle 13 years ago |

You will be violating their ToS and they will blacklist you.

If they send you a cease and desist, you will have to honor it. If you don't, they will have a case.

So it's completely legal until they tell you to stop, at which point they can sue you for damages.

ig1 13 years ago |

I'd just do it and if only stop if they complain.

If they decide to treat you in a hostile manner they could just cancel all orders that come through your site, feed you bad data, etc. without having to rely on the law at all.