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I intend to scrape (download all articles) from a newspaper website which has some terms and conditions listed in its footer. The part which seems to be in my interest is as follows:

You shall not copy, reproduce, republish, disassemble, decompile, reverse engineer, download, post, broadcast, transmit, make available to the public, or otherwise use the content of this website in any way except for your own personal, non-commercial use. You shall not adapt, alter or create a derivative work from any content of this website except for your own personal, non-commercial use. Any other use of the content of this website requires the prior written permission of XYZ

So does this also mean that I cannot scrape data from website and perform some analyses (machine learning and stuff) and use it to generate a report for

  1. Research purposes
  2. Commercial purposes
Laurel
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Basit Anwer
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1 Answers1

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Yes, it does. Using the downloaded content, whether it was scraped or individually downloaded one file at a time, for research or for commercial purposes would violate that TOS provision (unless some other provision contradicts it, or you obtain specific permission). The site owner could sue you for such a violation, should the owner become aware of it. I do not think it would be likely to be a criminal offense, depending on the jurisdiction.

David Siegel
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