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Is scraping a website allowed?

Is it okay to scrape a website for data?

It seems to me that if the data is publically available and even the source code for the page is visible through the View Source option, that scraping the website is also allowed. But I need to hear what others think about this first.

What could the website do to block scraping? Legally? Technically?

Would they need to block so that View Source fails? Is that even possible?

I'm curious...

Thanks,
newbieweb

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mattibutt

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ghemstrom

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curiouswebster

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I am not trying to block my website from scraping, I am trying to find if it's allowed for me to scrape other websites. Websites exist with data I want to import.

I wonder if that is allowed, and if it's possible just by reading the HTML.

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mattibutt

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ghemstrom

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curiouswebster

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Thanks.