Ask HN: Naive question about indexing website content

3 pointsyalogin4 comments

Is it legal to scrape sites and store them and server them up on my site (of course with a link to the actual site as well)? I see for example Fandango shows movies and move times for theaters all over. If I am working on something like that for another vertical will I be breaking some kind of copyright law?

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You know how every site has a "Terms of Use" link at the bottom? That's where it says "You agree that you will not use any robot, spider, other automatic device, or manual process to monitor or copy our Web pages or the content contained therein without prior written permission of an authorized officer of Fandango."

Also, there are restrictions on linking to Fandango; you may only link to their homepage.

Thanks. I was hoping may be there was some court ruling that would let me do that :)

I was referring to Fandango because they already index and show all the movie times for various shows. So does that mean they get permission from cinemark and other companies/sites?

Which jurisdiction are you targeting? The laws are very different depending on what country you are hosted in.

I forgot to mention that. Its in the US.

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