The short answer
Scraping publicly accessible web pages is, in most jurisdictions, legal — provided you respect a handful of constraints. The constraints have tightened since 2024, and the long answer matters because the gap between "legal" and "you will not be sued" is not zero.
This article is not legal advice. We are engineers, not lawyers. What follows is a practical summary of how the Krawly team evaluates each scraping job before running it, based on actual court rulings and the lawyers we have consulted with for client work.
The four-question checklist I run before every job
1. Is the data behind a login or a paywall?
Scraping content that sits behind authentication is the single fastest way to make a scraping job indefensible. The 2022 *hiQ Labs v. LinkedIn* ruling protected scraping of public profiles, but every subsequent case (*Meta v. Bright Data 2024*, *X Corp v. CCDH 2023*) has reinforced that authenticated content gets stronger legal protection. If you have to log in to see it, do not scrape it.
What our Lead Generation tool does — pulling emails from a public contact page — is fine. Scraping a member-only directory is not.
2. Does the site's `robots.txt` ask you to stay out?
`robots.txt` is not legally binding in the U.S. by itself, but it is admissible evidence of bad faith in *Computer Fraud and Abuse Act* (CFAA) cases and contractual claims. Some EU member states treat it as part of the implicit terms of access.
Practical rule: I read `robots.txt` (our robots.txt analyzer makes this trivial) before any non-trivial scraping job. If the site explicitly disallows my path, I either negotiate access via the site owner or move on. Sneaking past `robots.txt` is the kind of thing that turns a civil dispute into a criminal one in jurisdictions with anti-circumvention statutes.
3. Are you taking enough data to substitute for the original site?
This is the *hot news* / database-rights doctrine and it has teeth in both EU (Database Directive) and U.S. (state-law misappropriation). Scraping a sample of weather forecasts to enrich your app is fine. Scraping every weather forecast for every postcode and republishing them as an alternative service is exactly the kind of thing courts have shut down.
A useful test: would your scraped data set, if published, reduce the demand for the original site? If yes, you are in dangerous territory and need a license, not just a scraper.
4. Are you triggering anti-fraud, anti-abuse, or rate-limit protections?
This is where most engineers trip themselves up. Even if the *content* is public, the *infrastructure* that serves it is the site owner's. If you bypass IP rate limits, rotate residential proxies to evade detection, or solve CAPTCHAs at scale, you are evading protective measures that the site has explicitly put in place. CFAA in the U.S. and Computer Misuse Act in the UK both treat circumvention of technical protections as a separate offence regardless of whether the content was public.
Practical rule: respect the rate limit. If a site rate-limits you to one request per second, scrape at one request per 1.2 seconds. Krawly's tools all default to single-request-with-timeout behaviour for this reason.
What the recent cases actually say
The pattern across all four cases is the same: public content scraped at reasonable speeds = protected. Authentication-bypassing or rate-limit-evading scraping = liability.
What this means for the tools on Krawly
Every Krawly tool is designed around the four checks above:
If your scraping job needs anything stronger than what Krawly provides, you almost certainly need a commercial license from the source site, not a stronger scraper.
The decision flowchart, simplified
1. Is the data behind a login? → Stop. Get a license or don't scrape.
2. Does `robots.txt` disallow your path? → Stop. Negotiate or move on.
3. Are you republishing in volumes that compete with the source? → Stop without a license.
4. Are you tempted to bypass rate limits or anti-bot protections? → Stop. That's the line.
If all four answers are no, you are most likely on the right side of the law. Document your decisions, log the user agent you use, throttle your requests, and you'll be in defensible position even if questioned.
Tools you'll use to do this responsibly
Have a specific case?
If you have a borderline scraping question and want a second opinion before you ship, you can email us at info@krawly.io. We cannot give legal advice but we can usually point you at a relevant case or a lawyer who specialises in this area.