I wrote about Google’s essential hypocrisy when it comes to the value of AI training data this week, and now Kieran McCarthy has a good blog post outlining how incoherent and inconsistent the law around web scraping really is — in large part because the same big tech companies that scrape the entire web are quick to file lawsuits when you attempt to scrape their sites.
There are few, if any, legal domains where hypocrisy is as baked into the ecosystem as it is with web scraping.
Some of the biggest companies on earth—including Meta and Microsoft—take aggressive, litigious approaches to prohibiting web scraping on their own properties, while taking liberal approaches to scraping data on other companies’ properties.
[Technology & Marketing Law Blog]
