Published: January 20th, 2021
Website operators can consider a host of potential legal claims against entities that scrape their sites’ content without authorization, such as breach of a well-crafted terms of service agreement, copyright infringement, trespass, conversion, common law misappropriation, unfair competition, violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, misappropriation of trade secrets, and trademark infringement, among others. Each type of claim has its limits, and multiple claims may intersect or overlap in significant ways, particularly when it comes to preemption or remedies. Accordingly, the nature and context of both the unauthorized web scraping activities and the scraped content should be carefully evaluated to determine an appropriate response.
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