› Web scraping is a technique, and its legal treatment depends on how access is obtained and what happens to the data afterward.
› This guide explains key US cases and a narrower set of EU rules as of October 2026; it is general information rather than a legal opinion on a particular project.
› In shortVan Buren and hiQ address specific CFAA questions, not every claim arising from scraping.Website terms, copyright, and privacy need separate assessment.robots.txt is a crawler protocol, not an access authorization system.EU text-and-data-mining rules include lawful-access and rights-reservation conditions.
› Describe the data flow before asking whether it is legal A project that reads its own documentation differs from one that collects public profiles, republishes articles, or builds a commercial training dataset.