Internet Law and FTC Defense Attorney

[azgold]

I visited Richard's site this morning, lots of great resources for this industry, even for native advertising!

 

[no2pencil]

@mxyzptlkfishstix; My experience with webscraping, if a website is offering data that is publicly viewable, then it can be fetched, regardless of the means. Their TOS can indicate by which methods they disallow, however they would have a difficult time proving proof of methods used to fetch data, &/or what it's designed purpose was. For example : "IP hit site ever 5 seconds, provided what we think is an invalid user agent string, & then we assume data was sold". I believe more-over, the TOS indicates (& has stronger merit) how a user of the site can interact with user-areas of the site. For example, I create a gmail account, & then use my bot to auto-authenticate & send out email via smtp. Generally, a site is going to urge one to use their API rather than forcing manual procedure over automation. All that said, I still stand by, if it's publicly available information, they can't tell one how that it can or can not be gathered or used.

 

[MxyzptlkFishStix]

@mxyzptlkfishstix; My experience with webscraping, if a website is offering data that is publicly viewable, then it can be fetched, regardless of the means. Their TOS can indicate by which methods they disallow, however they would have a difficult time proving proof of methods used to fetch data, &/or what it's designed purpose was. For example : "IP hit site ever 5 seconds, provided what we think is an invalid user agent string, & then we assume data was sold". I believe more-over, the TOS indicates (& has stronger merit) how a user of the site can interact with user-areas of the site. For example, I create a gmail account, & then use my bot to auto-authenticate & send out email via smtp. Generally, a site is going to urge one to use their API rather than forcing manual procedure over automation. All that said, I still stand by, if it's publicly available information, they can't tell one how that it can or can not be gathered or used.

I'm not talking about scraping for emails and sending over SMTP (which violates CAN-SPAM). I talking about actually using a bot to machine generate an offer message and send it via a site's contact form.

Example:

 

[no2pencil]

Yeah, I agree with you on that. You shouldn't do that. Sorry, I misunderstood at first.

 

[Richard B. Newman]

Use of a BOT potentially invokes myriad state/federal prohibitions.