Comments on: The Legality of Web Crawling http://anonymousprof.com/the-legality-of-web-crawling/ Ramblings and Ravings of an Academic Wed, 07 Jan 2009 12:59:05 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.5.1 By: Aaron Schiff http://anonymousprof.com/the-legality-of-web-crawling/#comment-183 Aaron Schiff Wed, 26 Mar 2008 00:00:33 +0000 http://anonymousprof.com/the-legality-of-web-crawling/#comment-183 The bit about the basic data not being copyrighted is interesting. I know that copyright only protects the form of expression and not the content itself. But I'm wondering where the limits are. What if someone has a table of data and you reformat it a bit, is that ok? Or what if you turn the table into a graph? In terms of the TOS, I guess a lawyer could argue that way. On the other hand the risk is that the website doesn't see things the same way, and wants to go to court to find out the answer, which could be expensive. As far as ethics go, if they really didn't want their site crawled, they should have put something in robots.txt. If not then Google's already got all their data and done any number of things to it. And Google does no evil, right? :) The bit about the basic data not being copyrighted is interesting. I know that copyright only protects the form of expression and not the content itself. But I’m wondering where the limits are. What if someone has a table of data and you reformat it a bit, is that ok? Or what if you turn the table into a graph?

In terms of the TOS, I guess a lawyer could argue that way. On the other hand the risk is that the website doesn’t see things the same way, and wants to go to court to find out the answer, which could be expensive.

As far as ethics go, if they really didn’t want their site crawled, they should have put something in robots.txt. If not then Google’s already got all their data and done any number of things to it. And Google does no evil, right? :)

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