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I have a project idea for which I want to mine publicly available data on another website that it received by crowd-sourcing. This is so I have initial data for my own project. To reiterate, I want to write a robot to grab data that is displayed on another website and use it for my own website. Does anyone know the legality of this sort of thing? Does the original website own the data that was given to it by a crowd? Even if so, can I use it?
Web scraping is a legally complicated issue.
The hassles of legal action and enforceability often keep scrapers from getting in trouble.
Outright duplication is considered actionable, although courts have ruled that “duplication of facts” is permitted (US).
I advise you read up here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_scraping#Legal_issues
Best,