European Journal of Privacy Law & Technologies – Fascicolo 2023/2

fascicolo 2023/2 dell’European Journal of Privacy Law & Technologies (EJPLT)

Abstract

The paper examines the ethical and legal issues raised by web scraping technology. Attention is drawn to some landmark rulings to emphasize that jurisdictions such as the US and the EU Member States tackle issues of scraping from different perspectives. Although most litigation involves IP law, in particular copyright and the rights of database producers, scraping can also raise problems of data protection, unfair competition, and public or criminal law. Besides, many of such issues may fall into the gaps of the legal system. Accordingly, the paper aims to provide an overall framework for the ethical and legal issues of scraping, to take sides between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ uses of technology and, on this basis, flesh out the legal hard cases of the field. L’articolo esamina le questioni etiche e legali del data scraping attraverso l’analisi della giurisprudenza rilevante, per mostrare come gli USA e l’UE affrontino il fenomeno muovendo da prospettive molto diverse. Sebbene gran parte delle controversie riguardi la proprietà intellettuale, lo scraping solleva altresì questioni di protezione dei dati personali, concorrenza sleale e diritto penale. Il contributo evidenzia le lacune normative e le questioni etiche e legali da dirimere per distinguere tra usi “buoni” e “cattivi” della tecnologia, delineando al contempo i casi c.d. difficili.

The Journal was born in 2018 as one of the results of the European project “Training Activities to Implement the Data Protection Reform” (TAtoDPR), co-funded by the European Union’s within the REC (Rights, Equality and Citizenship) Programme, under Grant Agreement No. 769191. From 2019-2022, the Journal was supported by the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Commission within the European Project Jean Monnet Chair ‘European Protection Law of Individuals in relation to New Technologies’ (PROTECH) (611876-EPP-1-2019-1-IT-EPPJMO-CHAIR). In 2022 EJPLT has been further implemented thanks to winning the co-funding for the Jean Monnet Chair project ‘European Green Rights: reshaping fundamental rights for next generations’ (EUGREENEXT) (ERASMUS-JMO-2021-HEI-TCH-RSCH). The European Commission’s support for the production of this publication does not constitute an endorsement of the contents, which reflect the views only of the authors, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein. The Issues form 2018/1 to 2020/1 were published by Giappichelli Publisher. From Issue 2020/2 the Publisher is Suor Orsola Benincasa Università editrice.

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