copyright
Is it legal to copy property&#39;s listing from other&#39;s website
<p>as the question suggest. I've built a scrapper which scraps two websites to get property listing from there. As someone told me to scrape other website is illegal. but I think the listing ad of property is not a property of website. so I can scrape it. </p>

<p>can someone tell me it is legal to get others property advertisment?</p>

<blockquote>
  <p>"...the listing ad of property is not a property of website."</p>
</blockquote>

<p>Why do you think that? Just because a website exists does not mean you can legally scrape it.</p>

<p>Read the Terms of Service of the site; there is a good chance the TOS forbids scraping or copying of any part of the website in any manner, including scraping. </p>

<p>If the property listings are from a third party service that provides real estate listings to websites, then those property listings are licensed to that website, and by scraping them you will likely be violating the TOSs of those two services.</p>

<p>By illegally scraping the content of a website, you are opening yourself up to being involved in copyright infringement and/or being liable to be the subject of a civil lawsuit.</p>

<p>Facts, such as the address and size of a property, are not protected by copyright. But the words used to express those facts are, unless it contains no originality at all. The selection and arrangement of facts may also be protected by copyright, unless it is so natural and obvious that anyone might use the same arrangement without copying. For example, arranging a list of items in alphabetical or chronological order is obvious, and such an arrangement is not protected by copyright.  </p>

<p>Writing your own description of the property using the facts published on a web site would not be copyright infringement, but simply copying the entire description in bulk probably is. </p>

<p>If you scraped the site to populate your own database, and then used that db to generate ads with your own wording and standard arrangement of items, that would not violate the copyright in the posted ads. However, doing so might violate the TOS of the source site. That is not a copyright issue, but might lead to you being blocked from the source site, or to other legal action.</p>

<p>The above is all under US law, and the rules may be different elsewhere. Countries which recognize "sweat of the brow" copyright will take a different approach. In any case, before basing a business on such actions, consult an experienced copyright lawyer.</p>
