I have an idea for an app but I don’t know if it would be legal to implement it. Can I “crawl” information my app would use from assorted websites? For the purposes of this question, “crawl” means parsing out information on a website and storing it in my own database. This way, I would have my own server with all the information I need for my application to run.
I think there is nothing illegal about crawling RSS feeds. But what if the website I want information from doesn’t have an RSS feed? Is it legal to crawl that website?
Definitely not, you should ask the owner of the site, if you can extract the content of his website. Very often there is even information for the reserved rights at the bottom of a given site, but the lack of such, doesn’t give you a permission for taking the content. It is a good idea to provide a link, to the source of your content. In this way there shouldn’t be problems with the website owner.