It's hard to say. Did you ask the owners from the site? You shouldn't also forget that nowadays almost all sites contain advertisement, which is either the main reason for the site, or to help the site sustain itself.

Sure, your 12 hits a day won't have much impact. But what if it becomes common place? What if the majority of the people here used LWP to access perlmonks, decimating the ad hits?

I've written my share of LWP scripts, and I've written ad busting proxies. But I'm not convinced everything I did was ethical. I'd say it depends on the site, and the views of the owners of the site.

I don't think it's wrong for your script to pretend it's Netscape, but I do think it's wrong to ignore a robots.txt file. If the site would have a policy against automated harvesting, bypassing the policy would certainly be "wrong".

Abigail

In reply to Re: Fetching data from a corporate websites using LWP by Abigail-II
in thread Fetching data from a corporate websites using LWP by Poblachtach32

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.