The normative challenges of data scraping: legal hurdles and steps forward

Abstract

Contemporary society is characterized by the availability of immense amounts of data publicly available on the internet, both in traditional websites and social media accounts. Web scraping, a means for automatically extracting publicly available data through technical tools, is commonly used by businesses, researchers, law enforcement authorities as well as criminals to gather such data and extract value from it in several different ways. In this scenario, it is fundamental to correctly define the principles and laws applicable to publicly available data and to scraping itself, in order to define a clear boundary between legal and illegal uses. The versatility of scraping and the myriad of possible use cases reflects on the fragmentation of applicable legal instruments in different jurisdictions. This complexity requires jurists to adopt a holistic interdisciplinary approach and evaluate the implications of scraping under different legal domains like intellectual property, data protection, private law, criminal law and competition law.