in reply to OT: How legal are automated logins

So the complete steps for you would be:

1. Collect the TOS and other license info from all the sites that you would wish to use this way.
2. Collect the robots.txt files.
3. Collect all of the information about your company.
4. Contact a lawyer and get a legal opinion on what you are trying to do.


These steps will get you good insight as to where your possible liabilities would be for offering this as a service or product. You will want to actually go through these steps as when you step over the threshold of doing something like this for personal use to doing it for profit you become a much bigger target for legal actions. I personally would not do it unless I had a lawyer tell me that there was very solid ground to stand on and I had some sort of company entity to sheild me from liability.


-Waswas

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Re^2: OT: How legal are automated logins
by ysth (Canon) on Aug 10, 2004 at 19:31 UTC
    Checking for robots.txt should not be done just once, but regularly. And not all terms of service are only readable by a lawyer.
      I guess I would prefer the person to actually be defending me in a lawsuit tell me the scope of the license and my liabilities. I choose to specialize in unix, programming and networking not law -- Let me find bugs in the Layer's code and let him guide me on legal issues. =)


      -Waswas