Can I legally fetch tweets without twitter API? I am doing an RSS notifier, but I would like to add Twitter and Facebook feeds in it. as both social networks shut down their RSS services, I am fetching the content directly from the HTML public pages, parsing the content I want. Question is: Is what I am doing legal? Can I be sued for "stealing" information from their website? PS: I know I could use Facebook or Twitter's API, but I don't want to log-in to their services.
Twitter's terms says the following: Except as permitted through the Twitter Services, these Terms, or the terms provided on dev.twitter.com, you have to use the Twitter API if you want to reproduce, modify, create derivative works, distribute, sell, transfer, publicly display, publicly perform, transmit, or otherwise use the Twitter Services or Content on the Twitter Services. [...] You may not do any of the following while accessing or using the Services: (i) access, tamper with, or use non-public areas of the Services, Twitter’s computer systems, or the technical delivery systems of Twitter’s providers; (ii) probe, scan, or test the vulnerability of any system or network or breach or circumvent any security or authentication measures; (iii) access or search or attempt to access or search the Services by any means (automated or otherwise) other than through our currently available, published interfaces that are provided by Twitter (and only pursuant to the applicable terms and conditions), unless you have been specifically allowed to do so in a separate agreement with Twitter (NOTE: crawling the Services is permissible if done in accordance with the provisions of the robots.txt file, however, scraping the Services without the prior consent of Twitter is expressly prohibited); (iv) forge any TCP/IP packet header or any part of the header information in any email or posting, or in any way use the Services to send altered, deceptive or false source-identifying information; or (v) interfere with, or disrupt, (or attempt to do so), the access of any user, host or network, including, without limitation, sending a virus, overloading, flooding, spamming, mail-bombing the Services, or by scripting the creation of Content in such a manner as to interfere with or create an undue burden on the Services. facebook is a bit harsher: You will not engage in Automated Data Collection without Facebook's express written permission. So just go and use the APIs meant for the explicit purpose of automatic data collection.
Twitter don’t have to host your account UMG’s and Sony’s business is probably more important to Twitter than yours is. It seems Twitter have made a commercial decision to close your account down. They can do this: We may suspend or terminate your account or cease providing you with all or part of the Services at any time for any or no reason, … What’s happening is not fair use Fair use is a lot narrower than you think it is. UMG and Sony (and every other music label) get paid when people use their music on a commercial platform like Twitter. Which means, you enabling people to avoid this is directly reducing their market so this is not fair use. Giving credit does not help. Now, if your program blocked the use of copyrighted songs that might be ok. Your program looks exactly like a piracy tool I’m sure you have the best intentions but your tool readily enables copyright violations by others. That’s moving out of the realms of civil breach and into possible criminal sanctions. I wouldn’t push this if I were you. Your understanding of copyright is flawed This video is a good primer on copyright.
Content posted to the web is usually openly accessible to all (unless protected by a password, paywall, or similar restriction). But that does not mean it is freely copyable by all. Such content is protected by copyright in just the same way as if it had been published in a book of essays by various contributors. Unless the copyright holders (who are likely to be the original authors, but might not be) give permission, or an exception to copyright applies, copying such content would be clear and obvious copyright infringement, and any copyright holder could sue for damages. Permission could be given by publishing the content under a permissive license, such as a CC-BY-SA license, or any of many other available permissive licenses. Or a would-be reuser could find the copyright holders and ask for permission. If the holder cannot be found or identified, or does not respond, then no permission has been granted. In the US the main exception to copyright is fair use. See this answer and other threads with the fair-use tag here for more on fair use. Since the question seems to contemplate using the whole of the posted content, since it might well damage any potential market for that content, and since the use does not seem to be &quot;transformative&quot;, nor used for criticism or comment, a finding of fair use for this situation seems unlikely. But Fair use findings are very much fact-driven, and the exact facts do matter. Thus I cannot be at all sure whether a court would find this toi be fair use or not. In other countries there are a variety of exceptions to copyright, and I have not come close to reviewing them all. But none of the ones I know of seem to apply to the situation described in the question. Many are narrower than the US concept of fair use. I fear that without permission, copying this content would be infringement. However, it would not be infringement to create a site that includes a link to the existing content, and a summary or description of that content, along with new content, including comments on the old, with brief quotes to indicate what is being commented on.
There are no free legal copies online. They are accessible online through LexisAdvance, HeinOnline and Westlaw: this provides access, but not a downloadable copy.
There are multiple issues with what you are trying to do, including issues with copyright, personality rights, and data protection. You are trying to use other people's content and likeness for your advertisement. Unless you are certain that you can do this in your relevant jurisdictions, without their consent, this sounds like a very bad idea. At least under GDPR, “but they made it public” is not an excuse. Personal data is personal data regardless of how you acquire it. The GDPR also has a very broad concept of identifiability that goes beyond direct identifiers or PII. If you want to use other people's personal data, you need a legal basis, and must provide them notice about your processing. Consent (informed opt-in) is one legal basis, legitimate interest (opt-out) another. You are suggesting to avoid this by blurring PII, but you may also have to blur other content that is indirectly identifiable. Real anonymization that meets the GDPR's definition is a really hard problem. In some cases, a legitimate interest is able to avoid such problems. E.g. if I make a video with commentary about a Tweet, it would likely be OK to show surrounding personal data like the responses including the identities of the various accounts, to the degree that this is relevant to the commentary and/or necessary for proper attribution. However, that commentary likely has strong protections under freedom of expression. At least from an European viewpoint, a tutorial, demo, or advertisement would not have a freedom of expression argument that would shift a GDPR legitimate interest balancing test in your favour. Instead of blurring almost everything in your video or working on GDPR compliance, content licenses, and release forms, you should consider a different solution: create dummy content just for your videos. You can use your own content, and maybe add a dummy profile.
You can put anything you like in a ToS document, but not everything you might put there will be enforceable. By posting something on the web, you are inviting anyone to read it. In some jurisdictions that may include the right to make and store a personal copy, although not multiple copies or a copy for commercial use. You can taker technical measures to prevent automated access and automated downloads (scraping). There was a case (hiQ Labs, Inc. v. LinkedIn Corp, 938 F.3d 985 (9th Cir. 2019)) in which access restrictions were held binding in a US court, but in that case the site owner had notified the would-be reuser (a competitor) directly. The laws on this sort of thing may differ from country to country, and are not as well-settled as older parts of the law tend to be. The question asks: can I list in my terms of service that all users acknowledge I own their posts ... The only way in which the host could &quot;own&quot; the posts would be if the users transferred copyright to the host, or granted the host an exclusive license. Under US law this would take a written and signed document. Clicking an &quot;I agree&quot; box or button might constitute a valid signature. A statement that &quot;by using this site you agree ...&quot; would pretty clearly not. You might prohibit bots copying from your site and posting duplicates, but to prohibit users re-posting their own messages elsewhere is harder, legally, and leas reasonable in my view. Under US law you could not actually file suit for copyright infringement until you had registered the copyright, but that is not true in many other countries.
Facebook's local jurisdiction is the US. In the US, making false statements isn't generally illegal or tortious, as they are protected by the First Amendment to the US Constitution. So, Facebook isn't under any legal pressure to remove posts that are posting false information. It sounds like you've already asked them to remove the posts and they refused, so at this point you do not seem to have any procedural recourse with Facebook. It's possible your country or the country the person is posting from lacks free speech protections and would either prosecute or allow suits against someone posting false information, if that's the case you could try to get the local equivalent of a prosecutor to prosecute them. I realize that is unlikely to happen, the reality is that coordinated fake news on the Internet is still something that platforms are figuring out how to deal with fairly.
...articles are never signed by authors. Is it then enough that the magazine itself is in the public domain? Absolutely not. Even though articles are not signed, they are still copyrighted at moment of being written by whoever wrote them, and upon publication by who the authors are writing for. That's basic copyright law; read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention Further, the magazine's own Terms of Service outlines this: Intellectual Property The contents ... supplied to you in conjunction with the Site and/or a Digital Application (such contents, design and materials being collectively referred to as the "Economist Content"), is copyright of The Economist and its licensors. You may not use or reproduce ... for any reason without written permission from The Economist... http://www.economist.com/legal/terms-of-use