internet
Is it legal to download a website and display it on another that I own?
<p>I would like to know if it is legal to download the content of a website and display it in my own?</p>

<p>There is one way to include a website inside another: <code>&lt;iframe&gt;</code> (w3schools <a href="http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_iframe.asp" rel="nofollow">description</a>)</p>

<p>However, some websites decide that they don't want to get iframed. For example Google doesn't allow other websites to frame their content. This has of course certain reasons. There is a very simple option, the <a href="https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/X-Frame-Options" rel="nofollow"><code>X-Frame-Option</code></a> that can tell a browser that it must not render a page withing a frame if it is not from the same origin as the page itself.</p>

<p>So far so good. Just for the sake of completeness I want to say that it's still possible to display just the content of another website. The most trivial one would be to hit <code>CTRL + S</code> on my keyboard, save the website and host it on another server. A more sophisticated of course would be to write a program that does that for me. One could simply download the HTML page and embed the result into another.</p>

<p>I can imagine that e.g. copyright could be an issue. But what if my site states that it does not own the content etc. and that it did not modify anything and so on. </p>

<p>Is there a way that this could be legal?</p>

<hr>

<h1>Example</h1>

<p>What is with <a href="https://proxy-nl.hide.me/go.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.theindependent.com%2Fnews%2Flocal%2Fcity-county-issue-disaster-declarations%2Farticle_e3e4d39a-cb98-11e5-a8f6-0740f845609c.html&amp;b=24&amp;f=norefer" rel="nofollow">this example</a>? <a href="https://proxy-nl.hide.me" rel="nofollow">https://proxy-nl.hide.me</a> allows you to enter any URL and e.g. specify that it should remove JavaScript code. This allows you to see even www.theindependent.com, which tries to take counter measures against embedding their site, under another domain.</p>

<p>You are in breach of Copyright. Plain and simple.</p>

<p>Certain websites allow you to use the website content as long as <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">a link is made</a>, but the website must clearly state that. You may also use a tiny portion of the content if it falls under Fair Use, where "Fair Use" does not mean "I want to".</p>

<p>The best thing to do is not to do it. You can't copy anybody's work without consent.</p>

<p>If you're thinking about Google specifically then they offer multiple APIs so that you can use their content in a wide variety of ways.</p>

<p>It very well may be a copyright violation. It is definitely not a "plain and simple" copyright violation. Anyone who proffers an unequivocal answer to a legal question without asking any follow-up questions -- especially in an area as nuanced as copyright -- should not be trusted. At all.</p>

<p>At this point, it's impossible to answer your question because we don't have enough information. It sounds like the owner could establish that this meets all the elements of a copyright violation, but it's not at all clear whether it falls into any exception, e.g., fair use, or some weird, narrow area of First Amendment-protected expression that isn't yet recognized as fair use.</p>

<p>To get a fuller answer, you could provide more information about the factors that a court would consider when evaluating a fair-use defense:</p>

<ul>
<li>the nature of the original work;</li>
<li>the nature of your use of the original work;</li>
<li>the amount of the original work you're copying, relative to the whole; and</li>
<li>the effect of the copying on the value or market for the original work.</li>
</ul>

<p>With that information we could get a better idea of whether this is an acceptable use.</p>

<p>At one extreme, you might be making a mini-Amazon.com where you scrape and rehost the entire site and then funnel sales through your own company. If that's the case, be prepared to cease and desist.</p>

<p>But at the other end, you might just be grabbing a single page off of a site so you can mark it up to criticize web design, or annotate a transcript of a politician's speech to show how full of lies it is. In that case, you're probably in pretty safe fair-use, First Amendment territory.</p>
