I had a project I was working on that required a sort of news feed. A quick google search turned up a few news apis. They seem to scrape news sites and turn them into JSON, then charge for the feed.<p>YC even funded one of them! I'm curious about how this is possibly legal. If it is legal, it would of course be cheaper for me to simply scrape the website I need instead of paying one of the apis.
> it would of course be cheaper for me to simply scrape the website I need instead of paying one of the apis.<p>That's the business model of those APIs; for a segment of their customers it's cheaper to outsource the scraping to them than do it in-house.<p>As far as legality goes, it's in a bit of a grey area. What <i>you</i> do with the data is also a major factor, regardless of <i>how</i> the data was obtained, and I would argue this is more important than the "how" - forget republishing stories verbatim on your website, regardless of whether you're getting them via API, scraping, or manually copy/pasting. Other usages might be more permissible, and some might be totally fine for example. Keep in mind that the API provider doesn't have to be legal either - they could be anonymous or based somewhere out of reach of the US legal system and thus couldn't care less about any potential legal consequences.