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Aaron Swartz was prosecuted for scraping, while Meta does it without consequence (blog.curiousquail.com)
submitted 1 month ago* by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 39 points 1 month ago (4 children)

So scraping means any harvesting of data now?

We need a new name for the fairly painful process of trying to tease meaning out of people's unstructured HTML.

In any case downloading a bunch of stuff from JSTOR was not scraping. And he absolutely had authorised access to that data. They took exception to the quantity, mainly.

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  • [–] 10 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

    Scraping has multiple meanings.

    Web scraping is a specific type of scraping, but data via APIs or even torrents could be considered a scrape, even if that data is nicely structured.

    The commonality between them is they all have the implication that:

    • the data harvesting is automated
    • the data you harvest is not owned by you, and you don't have explicit permission to use it
    • the scope of what you harvest is broad and not targeted at retrieving specific limited pieces of data

    Any access patterns that broadly correspond to this could be considered scraping.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago (1 child)

    Sure. Fine. It means all of that now.

    But what are we going to call the difficult thing that we have to do to coax, say, unstructured event listings into reasonably structured data?

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