AI Companies Have Been Scraping The Internet for Years. But Is Web Scraping Legal?

Keep this in mind when scraping data from websites.

We all know that AI companies have been scraping the internet for years to feed their AI models, but little has been discussed about whether extracting data from websites is legal.

Sites like The New York Times have sued OpenAI accusing it of infringing on its copyrights by using millions of its articles to train AI like ChatGPT. While that trial is still ongoing, there have been other cases (preceding the AI hype) that have reached a verdict. In this article, we’ll analyze some of them.

This information will shed some light on the legality of web scraping, which is useful information whether you have scraped a website or plan to do so.