Web scraping for me, but not for thee
With regards to the hiQ case (IANAL, but I followed this case closely): the 9th circuit asserted that the CFAA (Computer Fraud & Abuse Act), which is a _criminal_ statute, does not apply to scraping websites. On the other hand, if you create a user account and scrape while logged in, that is a matter of contract/civil law, and the website can sue you to stop breaching the terms of service (plus maybe damages).<p>The takeaway for those of us in the trenches who feel we have as much a right as Google or Bing to crawl websites, is that we are not subject to arrest and imprisonment, just tort law. The ruling has apparently caused the major social networks to switch from criminalizing web scraping to putting most content behind a login and threatening to sue small companies out of existence.