Web Scraping
Web scraping consists in gathering data available on websites. This can be done manually by a human user or by a bot. The latter can of course gather data much faster than a human user and that is why we are going to focus on this. Is it therefore technically possible to collect all the data of a website in a matter of minutes this kind of bot.
Prerequisites
- python 2.7+
- requests
- beautifulsoup4
Websites used
References
- Webscraping with Python - Ryan Mitchell PDF
Copyright
Copyright Infringement: In most jurisdictions, web scraping is legal, but using copyright data contains certain restrictions. Violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA): This law, enacted to prevent computer hackers, prevents fetching data by getting unauthorized access to a page. Trespass to Chattel: Here, a chattel (or data) is violated if the website server is hurt in any way. Thus, trespass to chattel is violated if the server slows or stops because of the scraping.