Scraping a site is ethical?

At =-” href=”http://alex.halavais.net/news/archives/000798.html”>Rolan the Datapimp, Alex asks himself if collecting orkut.com data automatically with a script is legal or ethical.
Actually I scraped Epinions.com site for data and I don’t care too much about this nonsense copyright mess.
I really don’t understand these strange licences (or ToS, Term of Service). Could I say that this site can be accessed only on thursday if the humidity is above 3 something? That the email I send you can be read only with a certain program and only between 3pm and 4pm?
I totally agree with Alex when he says
… I could pay a few students minimum wage to record this data manually. Would that be acceptable? What if I had them sit in a lab and hit each page, saving a local copy? This would appear exactly the same as a scraper to Orkut, and would yield exactly the same results, but would presumably be acceptable.
Basically, I think noone can tell me how I can experience some digital content. I agree with World of Ends
You are never going to prevent us from copying the bits we want.

Reminder for myself: I need to open a webpage with “impossible-to-accomplish licences and ToS”.

3 thoughts on “Scraping a site is ethical?

  1. paolo

    Credo che sia solo in pausa. Le ho consigliato di non scrivere nulla finche’ le cose non sembrano funzionare ma credo anche che non abbia tempo/voglia ora.

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