I'm happy to be among the few thousands who is watching this video.. How sad is such videos are not being pushed by RU-vid to have more views due to its relevancy.
Great and informative video! what about directories or job boards? some may scrape information manually from business websites and some others might scrape information from other directories or job boards as many of the listings are visible without the need to signup in order to access them. Is there any infringement here even if the purpose is to benefit from it commercially (ie. developing a job board)?
We can’t give you legal advice because we don’t know the details of your project and we’re not authorized to give legal advice anyway, we’re not lawyers, but… Scraping job boards is generally admissible, but in some countries you might run into issues with database protection laws, so watch out for that. What’s far more important than the scraping itself is what you do with the data afterwards. If you only analyze the data, you’ll most likely be fine, but what we really wouldn’t recommend is scraping job listings and then republishing them somewhere else without the consent of both the publisher and the job board in question. You’re potentially looking at copyright infringment or unfair competition practices there.
@@Apify Thanks for your reply. I am not taking this as a legal advice, no disclaimers needed :) It's just that I don't see how this differs from curating a spotify playlist for example. And I am not talking about scraping a whole website but individually selecting some industry specific vacancies to showcase on my site. This can be done directly from company websites, not only from other job boards. But ok let's leave aside the job boards and focus on company websites... In the real estate industry, when they do not want agents to get involved it is clearly stated in the description. and in this case, there won't even be any commission asked anyway. So if they get to find a candidate from the ones that found the vacancy on my site, how exactly am I infringing or 'hurting' the company of whom I advertised that vacancy?
Individually selecting some industry specific vacancies directly from company websites is definitely a much lower risk, but somebody could still claim copyright over those job postings. The thing with copyright is that it does not require you to do anything bad. It allows the author to control distribution of their works. And you would be distributing their works, so they could legally require you to take the job postings down, or worse. In case of real estate it’s different, but similar. Real estate postings are generally not unique enough to be protected under copyright, but they often include photos. And those photos will generally be protected under copyright. So again, the authors are the only ones who can decide what can or cannot be done with the copyrighted work. But then there’s the fair use doctrine, which allows limited use of copyrighted work, and tons of exemptions and case law… In summary, “hurting” is not needed to infringe on copyright. Simply the fact of copying without authorization can infringe. But it also might not, depending on multiple factors. Law is complex and complicated. You could be fine, but also not, depending on a lot of seemingly tiny details. So if you really want to know the answer, please talk to a licensed lawyer 🙂
What are your thoughts on scraping data to use as potential evidence in Courts? I appreciate with the Thorn example you said that law enforcement would come in to review the scraped data and take the investigation from there, but do we currently see data scraping of potential evidence happening outside of this example? I'm thinking about all that potential material which has been uploaded en mass from atrocities onto social media etc. This still leaves us to question the authenticity of this data but in theory, data scraping could help us gather large amounts of evidence, can it not?
@@JuliaYoolia Hi Julia, sorry, I replied to your comment some time ago, but I don't see the reply. Perhaps it got flagged for some reason unknown to me. I will post it under this reply again. Luckily it's saved in my RU-vid activity history.
Web scraping can definitely help when the body of evidence is so large that it's simply not feasible to collect it manually. Besides Thorn, there are other, more mundane, applications of web scraping in collecting evidence. For example, when you need to save the contents of a whole website to prove that certain content was available there at a certain time. Or to archive social media posts of individuals who are spreading disinformation. You can extract text, videos, make screenshots, whatever you need to make your case. At a very large scale. Whether law enforcement agencies scrape on their own to collect this data, I'm not sure.
@@ondra-from-apify Hi Ondra, thanks so much for replying even though youtube has blocked your reply again so I can't see it :') I'm crying/laughing into the void. As a follow up to my question above, I wanted to ask how the parameters of the scraping search are set? I understand can ask the software to scrape all the data from XYZ website(s) but can you say you refine the search of what can be scraped, for example only take stuff with certain keywords or maybe only a specific kind of data (like photos, or audio?) How much filtering of the data can software do before it gets sent to law professionals to review the evidence?
@@JuliaYoolia RU-vid seems to be continually deleting Ondra's comments, so feel free to message him directly via Linkedin 🙂 www.linkedin.com/in/ondra-urban/
