Copyright claims are often brought by data hosts against scrapers. In the United States, copyrighted work is protected by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
Nonetheless, it’s widely known that facts alone can’t be copyrighted, so DMCA and similar legislation won’t protect data hosts against scrapers unless they have full control over the copyright of the stored content. The transfer of copyright ownership generally requires a written agreement signed by the copyright owner. Put simply, copyright is meant to protect originality and creativity, not facts.
Let’s take a Google results page as an example. Its design and layout may be regarded as creative work and hence can be copyrighted. At the same time, facts contained in a results page, including headlines and snippets, are not owned by Google. In fact, they are being pulled from other people’s websites by Google without transferring copyright ownership.
Given that results on Google SERPs are not protected by copyright, it’s only logical that we do not violate DMCA by scraping them. Although scraping is legal by itself, it’s possible for data hosts to mount legal defences against scrapers, including CFAA and DMCA violation claims.
On the other hand, the outcomes of recent lawsuits filed against scrapers prove that there are a lot of grey areas in current legislation on this matter, and courts may stand in favour of open access to publicly available information (see Sanding v. Sessions ruling). And even though data hosts may prevail against scrapers in courts, it’s often against their interest to sue. For example, if it weren’t for crawling public websites and scraping data from them, Google probably wouldn’t even exist. We don’t violate CFAA or DMCA when scraping publicly available information from Google SERPs. You can rest assured that using our platform and services is legal. It is not a violation of the law.
The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) was introduced back in 1986 as an anti-hacking measure that forbids unauthorized access to computers, which imposes a criminal penalty on “a party who intentionally accesses a computer without authorization or exceeds authorized access, and thereby obtains information from any protected computer.” CFAA-based claims are popular among data hosts because they provide for pressing criminal charges against scrapers.
In 2016 LinkedIn started sending cease-and-decease letters to hiQ Labs, the startup that was relying on data scraped from the popular social network to provide analysis of publicly available user profiles. Letters contained warnings that unauthorized access to a LinkedIn website was a violation of CFAA. Instead of ceasing its operations, the team of hiQ took LinkedIn’s accusations directly to court, claiming that the automated access of publicly available data isn’t a violation of the CFAA, while also asking the court to prohibit LinkedIn from preventing hiQ’s access, copying, or use of public profiles on LinkedIn’s website (i.e. information that LinkedIn members have designated public). The court decided in favour of hiQ, allowing the company to scrape LinkedIn’s public, non password protected data.
Since information on Google SERPs is also publicly available and non password protected, we do not break CFAA by scraping it.
We are well aware of recent Facebook lawsuits and cease and desist letters. So we will layout how we scrape Facebook groups and Instagram #Hashtags and Keywords to prove we are following all terms and conditions. We don’t log into Instagram, Facebook or any platform to access data. One of the biggest problems companies have is asking their users for Facebook or Instagram information, then using that profile in order scrape unauthorized resources on behalf of them as well! We take a different approach by strictly scraping Google SERPs. We do not log into Facebook, Instagram or any platform to scrape. We do not use any accounts to scrape or different IP’s to try and bypass blocked access. We are fully committed to complying with all platform’s terms and conditions.
TheLeadHunter.com obtains data via Google search engine results pages (SERPs). We do not access data by logging into any platform / social media platform. All data obtained is publicly available to anyone who uses Google search. We are committed to compliance with all relevant laws and regulations. We are committed to adhering to the terms and conditions of all platforms.
We don’t use automated bots.
We don’t login to any platforms.
Data is publicly available on Google.
We never ask for anyone’s login information.