That’s because one of the premium services of Octoparse is that it will scrape the data and store it on its own server - and Meta argues that Octoparse violates Section 1201 of the DMCA (the anti-circumvention part) because the scraping tool has to “circumvent” Meta’s technical tools put in place to block Octoparse.Ĭertain user generated content is also copyright protected and users grant Meta a Instead, it tosses in… a copyright claim. Perhaps notably, Facebook does not try to use either the CFAA or California’s state equivalent in this case. Accordingly, Meta seeks damagesĪnd injunctive relief to stop Defendant’s use of its platform and products in violation of its terms Instagram’s terms and policies, and federal and California law. Finally, Defendant claimed to use and distribute technologies to avoid beingĭetected and blocked by Meta and other websites they scraped.ĭefendant’s conduct was not authorized by Meta and it violates Meta’s and
#Octoparse user not activated software#
“premium” Scraping Software to launch scraping campaigns from Defendant’s computer networkĪnd infrastructure. Defendant’s Scraping Software was capable of scraping anyĭata accessible to a logged in Facebook and Instagram user. Second, Defendant developed and distributed software designed to scrapeĭata from any website, including Facebook and Instagram, using a customer’s self-compromisedĪccount (the “Scraping Software”). First,ĭefendant offered to scrape data directly from various websites on behalf of its customers (the Including Amazon, eBay, Twitter, Yelp, Google, Target, Walmart, Indeed, LinkedIn, Facebook andĭefendant’s service used and offered multiple products to scrape data. Improperly collect or “scrape” user account profiles and other information from various websites, Since at least March 25, 2015, and continuing to the present, Defendant Octopusĭata Inc., (“Octopus”) has operated an unlawful service called Octoparse, which was designed to The ability to scrape and extract data from webpages is not just useful, it’s how lots of services work, including search engines. This is actually… really really useful? Especially for researchers. Octopus offers a cloud-based service called Octoparse, which allows customers to extract web data from basically any URL without having to do any coding yourself. The first lawsuit, against a company called Octopus Data, raises all sorts of questions. Once again, neither of the defendants are as sympathetic as Power, and Meta even frames these lawsuits as “safeguarding” its users privacy.
![octoparse user not activated octoparse user not activated](https://winaero.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Windows-10-not-activated-2-600x338.png)
And, now, the company has announced two new lawsuits against scraping companies. Earlier this year, we noted how the company had sued a somewhat sketchy provider of “insights” into “influencers and their audiences” that had been scraping information on Facebook. More recently, Facebook parent company Meta has again gone after scraping operations. Publicly available information was legal to scrape.
#Octoparse user not activated registration#
Other tech companies - including Craigslist and LinkedIn - have brought similar lawsuits, though in LinkedIn’s case against HiQ the court cut back the earlier ruling, and basically said that it only applied to information that was behind a registration wall. That decision effectively said that Facebook could build its own silo, in which your data checks in but it never checks out.
![octoparse user not activated octoparse user not activated](https://nocode.b-cdn.net/nocode/tools/Octoparse-ss-2.png)
Over the years, we’ve pointed out how this decision and interpretation of the CFAA is one of the biggest reasons the market for social media is not as competitive as it could be. In that case Facebook relied on the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (the CFAA), and the courts sided with Facebook, saying that because Facebook had sent Power a cease-and-desist letter, that made the access (even with the approval of the users themselves!) somehow “unauthorized.” That involved a company that was trying to build a single dashboard for multiple social media companies, allowing users to log into a single interface to see content from, and post content to, multiple platforms at once. Most often, we’ve talked about this in the context of Facebook’s case over a decade ago against. However, more importantly, the ability to scrape the web should result in a better overall internet, potentially reversing the trend of consolidation and internet giants that silo off your info. Without the ability to scrape the web, we’d have no search engines, no Internet Archive, and lots of other stuff wouldn’t work right either. For many years we’ve written stories regarding various lawsuits over scraping the web.