No more debased form of internet commenting than laypersons debating the law, but a comment on this article does address some of the legal issues this raises.
The comment is from a non-lawyer but raises good points about selling scraped data and scraping that brings down / slows sites as being particularly illegal.
Here's the (edited) comment (in re: competitors suing over this article):
"I’ve dealt with this kind of law in a tertial way and can second your statement that subpoena powers would be the most dangerous (and stupid) thing they could grant you right now.
I’m not a lawyer, but in my dealings in this area I know that there are a couple things that spell MAJOR federal crime: One is scraping data and then selling it (the selling is where the prison time comes in), and the other is bringing down a site / affecting page load time (sabotaging a competitor and so on).
That doesn’t mention all the aspects of this story I’m sure you couldn’t talk about publicly.
A lawsuit would be fun for us voyeurs admittedly because you would have access to view ALL activity on their servers, email accounts, and so on and on. And once it is public record, it would be available for all of us to see. Now THAT would be a good article!
Yeah these guys would be majorly foolish to give you subpoena power right now!"
The comment is from a non-lawyer but raises good points about selling scraped data and scraping that brings down / slows sites as being particularly illegal.
Here's the (edited) comment (in re: competitors suing over this article):
"I’ve dealt with this kind of law in a tertial way and can second your statement that subpoena powers would be the most dangerous (and stupid) thing they could grant you right now.
I’m not a lawyer, but in my dealings in this area I know that there are a couple things that spell MAJOR federal crime: One is scraping data and then selling it (the selling is where the prison time comes in), and the other is bringing down a site / affecting page load time (sabotaging a competitor and so on).
That doesn’t mention all the aspects of this story I’m sure you couldn’t talk about publicly.
A lawsuit would be fun for us voyeurs admittedly because you would have access to view ALL activity on their servers, email accounts, and so on and on. And once it is public record, it would be available for all of us to see. Now THAT would be a good article!
Yeah these guys would be majorly foolish to give you subpoena power right now!"