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Is web scraping legal? · there is no internet law, only the law of every jurisdiction your scraper touches

Updated Legal information, not legal adviceAbout this documentShowHide

Sean McDermott, Co-Founder and CEO, UnGovr

Written by Sean McDermott (with AI assistance) using the LexLint law library, which supplied every legal instrument, status and date on these pages, and the handbook and the brief's own long reads that carry the depth behind each one.

Every law named here links to its summary page on lexlint.io, translated to English (if needed) and restructured to a standard format for human and code use. Every case links to the court's or the regulator's own record where one could be reached.

© 2026 UnGovr, publishing as LexLint. The text and the figures are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0: share and adapt them, including commercially, with credit to LexLint (UnGovr) and under the same license. Please contact LexLint at hello@ungovr.org to discuss other terms. Logos and wordmarks belong to their owners.

Law library as of .

This document describes the law as written and dated; it does not apply it to any system. The notice in the footer says what that means.

No body of law governs the internet. A scraper is under the law of every jurisdiction it touches, and the jurisdictions are found by asking where each party is: you, the machine, the site, the people on its pages, and the model if one is in the loop.

A newspaper cartoon of a courtroom under a sign reading INTERNET COURT, with a wall of law books behind the bench under a plaque reading GLOBAL LAW. Five judges of mixed genders and ethnicities in enormous wigs sit at the bench: one asleep, one heaving a gavel too big to lift, one squinting through a magnifying glass at a book marked LAW held in both hands, one tangled in a computer cable, one raising a finger to nobody. At a long table on the left a crowd of a big company's attorneys argue over boxes of paper and a trolley of binders. On the right a nervous defense attorney sits at a small desk beside the defendant, a young person in jeans, sneakers and a t-shirt reading SCRAPING IS FUN, hands in pockets, next to a gaming PC with its side open showing a graphics card and its fans, a monitor on top showing a tiny terminal window, and a keyboard and mouse, while reporters with notebooks, a photographer and bloggers filming on phones and a selfie stick watch from the gallery.
There is no internet law, but an internet court could be fun.

1There is no internet law

No body of law governs the internet as a whole. There is the law of each jurisdiction: every country makes its own, and inside many countries each state or province adds more. A scraper is under the law of every jurisdiction it touches, and it touches several at once: the one you work from, the one the program runs in, the one the website belongs to, and the ones where the people named on its pages live.

Three beliefs about scraping are common, and each is mistaken in a way that has a document of its own here.

  1. “Anything on a public page is mine to take.” Being able to see a page does not settle what you may do with what is on it. The public-data document explains why.
  2. “robots.txt is the law.” It is a request, not a rule. The access-controls document explains what that file is and what it is not.
  3. “The country where the website’s server sits decides which law applies.” The server is almost never the answer. The whose-law document, which comes next, explains what is.

2The parties around a scraper

In law, a party is a person or organization that holds rights or owes duties in a situation, and so can be held to account. LexLint's handbook on software law names six parties around any program that acts online, and a scraper has the same six. Each one has a location, and each location can bring its law with it.

Makes itthe developer or publisher, the model provider, upstream suppliers, open-source projectsDistributes itthe store or marketplace, the importer, the reseller, the integrator
Runs itthe company that runs it for its customers, a self-hosting customer, hosting and cloud, the services on the request pathSCRAPERa program that reads pages it does not own and keeps some of what is on them, on someone's instruction and in someone's nameOversees itregulators and courts, auditors, standards bodies, platform rule-setters
Uses itthe user as principal, the affected person, the data subject, a minorIt talks tothe sites and interfaces it reads, the recipients it writes to, rightsholders, other users and devices
The six parties around a scraper. Each box opens that party's entry in the handbook's parties document.

The maker is whoever wrote the scraper: you, if you or someone working for you built it, or the vendor or the AI model provider, if they did.

Whoever runs it may be you, the cloud service it runs on, or a vendor that runs it for you.

The party this whole brief turns on is the site the scraper reads, the company behind it and anyone whose work is published on it, because most of the law that is particular to scraping exists to protect them.

For a scraper, the people it reaches are the people on the pages: the names, faces, posts and contact details you collect. They are affected by what you do with their details, which are personal data, and each of them is a data subject with rights under the privacy law of the jurisdiction where they live.

The regulators and courts are those of every jurisdiction the other parties bring in, so more jurisdictions mean more of them.

Whoever distributes it is rarely present for a scraper, because the role belongs to whoever sells or passes on software someone else made, and most scrapers are built and run by the same organization.

3The questions that find the jurisdictions

Four questions find the jurisdictions whose law applies. The fourth matters only when an AI model reads what you collect or learns from it.

  1. Where are you?you
  2. Where does the scraper run?the machine
  3. Where does the site have legal standing? Often more than one jurisdiction.the site
  4. If a model is in the loop: whose, and where is its provider?the model

The answer is nearly always more than one jurisdiction. You know the first two already. The third takes work: a site can belong to a company in one country, sell in a second and name a third in its terms. Next, the whose-law document is how to find it.

4What scraping shares with the law of AI agents, and what is its own

SubjectWhat it covers
Shared with the law of AI agents
The parties and their jurisdictions The six parties, where each one is, and the hook rule of each body of law.
The people in the data Privacy law over the names, faces and posts on the pages.
AI law When a model collects, reads or is trained on the pages.
The record What a record has to show afterwards.
Cross-border transfer Data that leaves the country it was collected in.
Scraping's own
The counterparty The target site is the central [not in the glossary: counterparty], where the handbook's center is the user.
Computer misuse Computer-misuse and unauthorised-access law: what it means to be on a site without permission.
Terms of use Terms of use forming a contract with a machine.
Anti-circumvention DMCA §1201 and its equivalents: getting past a technical measure.
Database rights Database rights over a collection, where they exist.
Text-and-data mining The text-and-data mining exceptions and the right to reserve against them.
Unfair competition Unfair competition, hot news and trespass to chattels.
Crawl signals robots.txt and the other ways a site says what it wants from a crawler.
Revocation A cease-and-desist letter, an IP block, a changed terms page.

The first group is ground this brief shares with LexLint's handbook on the law of AI agents, which covers it in depth, starting with the handbook's parties document. The second is this brief's own: the law that exists because of what a scraper does to a site, taken up in the documents that follow.

The long read. Introduction: The 6 parties around software carries the depth behind this document, with every citation and its date.