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Comment by tempestn | Hacker News Reader

No. For one thing, this ruling simply dealt with copyright claims. If you scrape a site you are subject to their terms of service, most of which prohibit scraping. So there would be contract and possibly even CFAA claims to deal with.

Also, the specific reason the copyright claims were dismissed in this case is that craigslist does not have an exclusive license on its posts. If Hacker News' terms exclusively license comments (which I doubt, but I haven't checked), that would make this particular ruling less relevant. It is also possible that the comments' authors could make claims against you, should they wish to do so.

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Can terms of use prohibit scraping for reuse, while still allowing Google, et al., to index?

I genuinely wonder this. Can I say, "it's OK for XYZ to scrape, but not ABC?" (Or is it general use -- scraping OK/not OK?)

I think it's different for API usage, because you enter an agreement with an entity by signing up, etc. I'm speaking specifically to the unauthenticated scraping/indexing.

I don't know, but I suspect that they can. If I own some data, I should be able to give (or sell) it to you and not to someone else.

That said, once I've given it to you, if you choose to give it to someone else, I have no claim against that someone (although I might against you, depending on our contract). That's the heart of 3taps' position as I understand it; they get craigslist post data from third party sources like search engines, instead of scraping craigslist, and so do not have a contract with craigslist.

I'm pretty sure I agree with you, if you have a specific agreement with one of the parties.

What about "anonymous" scraping, however? (I put it in quotes because I know you can reverse DNS/UserAgent/etc. identify... but that's simple to spoof, and we're discussing within a sophisticated context.)

Can I say that "OOgle" can use my data (because I want visitors) but others can't? (To complicate, can I exclude only certain, specified, parties and include all others?)

This ruling did not just deal with the copyright claims, it dealt with all of the claims. It simply dismissed the copyright claims.

Yes, you're right. What I meant to say was that only the copyright claims were ruled on, but even that is not strictly accurate. (And in fact, a conspiracy claim was also dismissed, so doubly inaccurate.)

To clarify, my meaning was that among the various potential legal impediments to scraping and displaying website contents, this judgement would set precedent for copyright only, if anything.

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