outscrape
Junior Member
- Nov 23, 2016
- 181
- 145
One of the major uses of scraping is to gather content for sites. What I'm wondering - would you consider this whitehat?
Here are the different versions as I see it:
1) Scrape copyrighted content and repost it exactly as is - Blackhat, probably not very useful, maybe ok for churn and burn.
2) Scrape copyrighted content and spin it or combine it with other content to produce something unique - Grayhat?
3) Scrape public data and repost it exactly as is - White hat, works sometimes for certain data that is refreshed regularly (sports scores for example).
4) Scrape public data and change it or create a better portal for viewing it - White hat.
Basically, scraping data itself can sometimes be considered blackhat, but legally it is often what you do with the data that's a problem. So I think if you "manipulate" or change the data significantly, it is no longer blackhat, or if the data was public to begin with it is no longer blackhat.
I am only asking because I'd like to be able to tell clients, and am wondering what people think.
Here are the different versions as I see it:
1) Scrape copyrighted content and repost it exactly as is - Blackhat, probably not very useful, maybe ok for churn and burn.
2) Scrape copyrighted content and spin it or combine it with other content to produce something unique - Grayhat?
3) Scrape public data and repost it exactly as is - White hat, works sometimes for certain data that is refreshed regularly (sports scores for example).
4) Scrape public data and change it or create a better portal for viewing it - White hat.
Basically, scraping data itself can sometimes be considered blackhat, but legally it is often what you do with the data that's a problem. So I think if you "manipulate" or change the data significantly, it is no longer blackhat, or if the data was public to begin with it is no longer blackhat.
I am only asking because I'd like to be able to tell clients, and am wondering what people think.