Screen scraping Flick.r -- A Yahoo Company

by misery
2 replies
  • SEO
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Hello, I'm trying to determine if screen scraping the website flickr.com is legal to do. The "Terms" link at the bottom of the page, links me to the website flickr.com/help/terms but then redirects me to the Yahoo Terms of Service, which does not state anything prohibiting screen scraping, crawling, or any automated functions to harvest data.

However, on Flickr's API page, they mention: "Screen scraping flickr.com isn't good. The API is the scalable way to get this data, and we also routinely block screen scrapers."

They only say it isn't good, and will be blocked. But since the Terms don't state I can't, am I free to screen scrape?

Any feedback is great!

Thank you.
#company #flickr #scraping #screen #yahoo
  • Profile picture of the author yukon
    Banned
    If it's not public domain it's not your content to take. Since this is an IM forum I guess your wanting make a profit from the content.

    Scraping on it's own isn't illegal but taking another persons content & using it for profit can get you into trouble If you stumble onto someone hell bent to prove a point.
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  • Profile picture of the author UnleashReality
    they provide an API because they don't mind you accessing the data that the API provides for

    If you're looking for user data (view counts, ratings, dates, etc) then you'll overload their servers by downloading entire webpages when they could just service your calls with an api endpoint
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