Is selling a "website screen scraper" illegal?

Posted by Yatendra Goel on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Yatendra Goel
Published on 2010-04-17T19:12:28Z Indexed on 2010/04/18 10:53 UTC
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Filed under:

java

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screen-scraping

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legal

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not-programming-related

I have coded a "website screen scraper" and want to sell it commercially. I know that webpages scraped by the screen scraper are restricted to be scraped by the webmaser of that website.

The robots.txt file of the website says that its webpages must not be scraped.

So my question is whether selling that screen scraper is a crime or using that screen scraper is a crime in legal terms.

I know that this question is related to law but I thought the software experts on SO must also have answer to this question.

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