The legality of web scraping has been repeatedly affirmed by courts in the United States and Europe. The landmark hiQ Labs v. LinkedIn case (US 9th Circuit, 2022) confirmed that scraping publicly available data is not prohibited by the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. European courts have similarly held that scraping public data does not violate computer access laws when it does not circumvent technical protection measures.
Despite legal protections, websites targeted by scrapers routinely file abuse complaints with hosting providers claiming that scraping constitutes unauthorized access or copyright infringement. Standard hosting providers comply with these complaints because it is easier than evaluating merit. Bulletproof hosting providers evaluate the actual legal situation.
The technical act of making HTTP requests to public websites is the same whether performed by a human browser or a scraping bot. Websites do not have a legal right to prevent data collection of their publicly displayed information merely by declaring their dislike of scraping in terms of service. Bulletproof hosting recognizes this legal reality.