question about scraping
 

i am thinking of writing a script that scrapes other vbulletin forums on the web and inserts their contents into my own forum.

is this illegal?

Have you considered copyright issues ?

How would you feel if someone did this to you?

It depends on what type of content we are talking about.

the internet is currently saturated with every single kind of forum for every single topic you can imagine.

judging by the links in your signature you know this is true - its nearly impossibe to get a brand new forum going. people who visit an empty forum (thats even if they find it) dont stick around any longer than a few seconds.

this scraper would be designed to get new forums going with some threads and members that are scraped from other sites so that when you start a new forum you can already have thousands of posts and a few hundred members to entice people to start posting.

so far no one has answered my question - i am concerned about the legal aspect of this. i am not going to write a script like this unless i know it is legal.

Since most forums list a copyright, this would be a copyright violation for that person's property. Charges can be levied, even law suits.

Property is property, whether intellectual, personal, or published on the internet.

Therefore, without express permission of the forums' owners, this would be considered an act of theft, copyright violation, and plagiarism.

Additionally, illegal or not, it's just plain wrong.

Regards,

Alisa

Yes

confirmed. I have already talk to an atty, and a very good host about this.
It would also be a valid DMCA complaint, so if anyone complained, then
you would not be up long if you are using a reputable host. according to
the atty and host I spoke with, they agree that the content that is posted
on a forum is owned by that forum, and would violate copyright if you
take it without their permission.

If you can not earn your hard work like the rest of the
forums, then you are in the wrong business, and you will
never be respected as a forum that scraped content to
get your forum going, and people do tell....

I am starting my forum from the ground, so I can avoid
these easy problems that you want to step into, will it
be hard work? Will it take years to get going? It probably
took years for even the biggest forums to get going, and
you have to put your dues in just like they did.