Direct answers to the questions buyers ask about web data. One question per page, every number sourced.
No. robots.txt is a voluntary protocol, not law, and no US court has held that ignoring it is by itself unlawful. It still changes your legal position.
hiQ won the CFAA fight and still lost the case. The Ninth Circuit protected public scraping; a contract claim ended the company. Both halves still apply.
Prices are facts, and facts are not copyrightable. Public price collection is the best-supported case in scraping law. The constraints are contract and antitrust.
Scraping public data is generally lawful in the US, and the real risk sits in contract and privacy law rather than hacking statutes. What the cases actually held.
