[HN Gopher] The Supreme Korean court says that scraping publicly...
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The Supreme Korean court says that scraping publicly available data
is legal
Author : PigiVinci83
Score : 198 points
Date : 2022-08-12 16:31 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.lexology.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.lexology.com)
| PigiVinci83 wrote:
| Other news on web scraping world at
| https://thewebscraping.club/p/a-brief-wrap-up-of-the-latest-...
| recycledmatt wrote:
| Do scrapers all proxy out of Seoul now?
| krzyk wrote:
| That ruling is not surprising. Just affirming comon sense.
|
| Without it e. g. Web search would not be possible.
| spullara wrote:
| Scraping is legal in the US as of a few years ago.
|
| https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/technology/...
| 323 wrote:
| Tech people applaud this, but then they are all upset when
| someone collects 100 mil Facebook/... public profiles.
| mgliwka wrote:
| http://haveibeenscraped.com/
| kelnos wrote:
| That's quite the broad brush you're painting with.
|
| We should all understand that if you post something that's
| public, it's... public.
| [deleted]
| ctocoder wrote:
| there is going to be a lot of scrapers running out of South Korea
| :)
| exysle wrote:
| In other words, you can build a Korean 'Google' today by scraping
| Google.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Well, the ruling says you can't have it legally enforced if you
| don't put any effort into it, but Google definitely puts effort
| into blocking scrapers.
|
| Also, Koreans mostly use Naver as their search engine.
| KMnO4 wrote:
| Good luck. Legal precedent has exactly zero impact on Google's
| fair use policies. You'll get throttled, and then banned before
| you get your first customer.
| armchairhacker wrote:
| I think the bar to whether something is an "illegal data breach"
| or not, should be whether the security is half-decent according
| to most security researchers. Because in cases like these (and
| the one where someone almost got arrested for clicking "view
| source"), the vast majority of security researchers will agree
| that the security was terrible and irresponsible.
|
| Even scraping public data could be a gray area e.g. if you're
| scraping a _huge_ amount of possible addresses or de-aggregating
| on a massive scale. More importantly, you could _say_ that you
| are doing this, e.g. claim that you found a "secret" 64-bit key
| by evaluating every possible one. But if your data is accessible
| via simple API requests, clearly there is limited "guessing" or
| brute-force going on.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| > The Supreme Court held that the Defendants did not access an
| unauthorized or restricted information network and found
| Defendants not guilty of violating the Information Protection Act
| based on the following findings: (i) there was no objective
| evidence showing that access to Yanolja's API server was
| restricted or that Yanolja has implemented any technical measures
| blocking unauthorized access; (ii) Yanolja's general terms of use
| was clearly applicable to registered users only; (iii) Yanolja's
| general terms of use did not prohibit use of packet capture and
| scraping, which was used by Defendants; (iv) Yanolja's API server
| was accessible via mobile app and a PC web browser; and (v) there
| was no reason to restrict access to Yanolja's API server, as it
| was not used for storing valuable business information.
|
| I am not a South Korean lawyer (or any lawyer), but basically
| this just means you do have to actually put effort into
| restricting access to information if you want to sue someone over
| illegally accessing it, right?
| mikeryan wrote:
| The US Supreme Court has actually called this a Gate Up/Gate
| Down approach and that if anyone can get in at any time the
| Gate is down. This is in respect to the Computer Fraud and
| Abuse Act.
|
| It seems the Korean Courts have affirmed this right as well.
| jahewson wrote:
| Gate up = open, gate down = closed. It's echoing a medieval
| portcullis.
| danso wrote:
| I wonder if the Korean ruling cited SCOTUS as a reference
| point
| olliej wrote:
| I would kind of hope not - that would imply that they were
| considering US laws as in someway relevant to Korean law.
| [deleted]
| killingtime74 wrote:
| (I am a lawyer) courts routinely consider foreign
| judgments especially in the case of the highest court
| where they are at the bleeding edge of the law. They are
| not binding of course.
| threatofrain wrote:
| The US references legal happenings from abroad.
| hugh-avherald wrote:
| It's common for courts around the world to regard the
| decisions and reasoning of foreign courts as having good
| persuasive authority, even if they're not technically
| binding. Naturally, this is even more the case if the law
| is nearly identical across borders (as through trade
| agreements).
| throwaway14356 wrote:
| it should be mandatory for law makers. If other countries
| spend millions figuring stuf out you should at least have
| to explain what is wrong about it
| abraae wrote:
| So you're saying the rest of the world should be obliged
| to study SCOTUS reversing roe vs Wade when making their
| own abortion legislation?
| mirkules wrote:
| What are some examples of this?
|
| E.g. if a website is free but requires an account to access
| (i.e. valid email address), is it still considered publicly
| accessible or not?
| jffry wrote:
| I do not know for sure either way, but my assumption is
| that it would be different if you must create a user
| account and in the process agree to terms of service that
| prohibit scraping.
| retcore wrote:
| This is very old hat. A friend battled the old British Telecom,
| after Deutsche Telekom (the rest crumbled after that) to
| publish Telex businesses directories a whole couple of
| generations ago.
|
| Copyright laws protect the structure and occasionally(via trade
| dress usually) formatting of your data. But common sense
| informs this entire oeuvre of issues that if the utility of the
| information that you are working with is inherently extant ion
| openness then the judiciary will politely post you a clue and
| the check. Utility forms a considerable amount of legal
| doctrine in so called intellectual property(which is a
| fallacious misnomer introduced into the lexicon purely for
| purely self serving reasons only very recently). Infringing a
| unused order poorly exploited patent and the registration owner
| sues? No fear because you're going to have to pay fair
| royalties and be allowed to carry on unless you been some kinda
| jerk. This is all about the appropriation of the basic
| infrastructure for human life. Yet the amount of misunderstood
| and very elementary (Googleable) law passing debate without
| comprehension is much more frightening than this moot threat,
| it indicates nearly complete cooption of principal values of
| human development.
| munk-a wrote:
| Point 3 seems the most restrictive to the applicability of this
| ruling - it sounds like everyone's TOS is likely going to be
| updated with a clause prohibiting packet capture and scraping.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| intrestingstuff wrote:
| my approach:
|
| if it's on google, it can be on my website
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| Err, there is still copyright. Google only posts snippets as
| fair use.
| spullara wrote:
| that is too restrictive. robots.txt isn't the law.
| michaelmior wrote:
| It's not, but why ignore the express wishes of website
| owners?
| stickfigure wrote:
| The EULA of this HN comment requires you to deposit $2 in
| my bank account upon reading. Why are you ignoring my
| wishes?
| jacquesm wrote:
| What is your bank account?
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| out of disrespect for IP
| a1369209993 wrote:
| Which why they rightly did not say "if and only if".
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