Industry News

The legality of screen scraping is far from simple to address. Laws, where they exist, differ by jurisdiction, and court rulings seem ambiguous at best. This is not surprising as most cases against scrapers are brought using laws that were intended for other types of abuse. It is... Read More

Not all scraping is hard to counter. The simplest case is where normal web robots adhere to the Robot Exclusion Standard according to what you have entered into your robots.txt file for your website.  Generic robots not honoring the protocol that scrape indiscriminately are... Read More

Yes and No. CAPTCHA tests can be highly effective in the right place if the data is not too valuable for scrapers. There are two main ways of circumventing CAPTCHA tests, by using OCR (optical character recognition) software or to use labor in low cost countries to manually solve... Read More

Generally the hard part of stopping screen scrapers is not placing a block on them, but rather finding them in the first place. Once you have identified a scraper, it is essential to place the block as quickly as possible to stop the activity from the current source. When... Read More

Judge Charles Breyer of District Court in Northern California ruled that changing your IP address or using proxy servers in order to access public websites you have been forbidden to visit is a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). This was ruled in a case... Read More

Denver Post reports that a news-scraping service committed copyright infringement by reusing content from the Associated Press (AP).The news-scraping service managed by Meltwater was a premium service where their customers could track when they are mentioned in the press.... Read More

Online content providers and website operators are forced to deal with a number of IT intrusion and security threats nowadays as cybercriminals’ techniques become more advanced. However, one of the long-standing threats with which hackers are increasingly prolific is... Read More

The Swedish court of appeal has overturned a previous judgement in where the Swedish igaming company Unibet were found guilty of screen scraping ATG. In the previous judgement Unibet was to pay 35 MSEK in damages to ATG for breaching their database rights. The court of appeals... Read More

According to this article Ryanair stopped using captchas: http://www.travelweekly.co.uk/Articles/2020/11/21/38831/comment-what-now… The article makes a few bald statements of how dependant ryanair is on the travelagents. Ryanairs answer to this seems to have been to move... Read More