Tools

Infringing intellectual property (IP) rights by lifting content from a website to reproduce on your own is known as scraping. The terms web-scraping and screen-scraping, around since 2007, refer to appropriating any sort of data illicitly. Scraping is now central to the debate about when and how facts can be copyrighted (in law they can't) and how media monopolies can keep hold of lucrative news exclusives and content ownership in general. Sites known as news aggregators don't display content, but merely provide links for subscribers, raising the question of whether they have the legal right to distribute other people's data (aka unlicensed reuse and monetisation), and of whether links to protected or libellous data are themselves illegal. Listings and databases from vulnerable sources - so-called sensitive verticals — can also be scraped automatically by malware, but the fightback has begun in the form of automated anti-scraping surveillance systems and takedown demands by lawyers.

Send your buzzwords, jargon and new and exotic usages to tony.thorne@kcl.ac.uk

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