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Comment by aikah | Hacker News Reader

> CAPTCHAs and IP blacklistings are things you encounter routinely in perfectly legitimate and legal web scraping projects

It's only legal if the site TOS says it is.You dont get to decide wether you can scrap websites legally or not.People got sued for scraping,trust me. And it's not even about fraud or spam.

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It's more complex than that. Whether the site's TOS are enforceable is a matter of jurisdiction and may depend on the intent of the web scraper.

Ryanair for example has lost several cases where they tried to forbid scraping their website on the groups that data scraping promoted free competition and served consumers in general. See the latest decision here: https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/ryanair-suffers-setback-ge....

Does the location of Espion in Mauritius have anything to do with this? Are the servers located there?. Good design of the site and good work.

Actually no, and I don't think our location would protect us from legal liability. Our servers are outside Mauritius, hosting locally would be very expensive and induce latency.

The legality may also depend on the type of data being collected. For example, it is likely safer to scrape Yelp to gather public facts like business locations and phone numbers versus if the data is "copyrightable" like customer reviews. Both, however, would violate Yelp's TOS. See: http://streetfightmag.com/2013/03/04/legal-battles-erupt-ove...

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