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You may remember the Google Books lawsuit where Google was digitally copying the entirety of books and making them available online.

Google won that suit under fair-use as a massive searchable database was found to be transformative as well as the non-commercial nature.

So; if your web scraping companies goal is to allow people to bypass a paywall I suspect you'll have trouble in the future. If your web scraping company instead say allows people to do market analysis on how many people need a piano tuner in NYC and it doesn't do that by copying a NYT article doing original research I think you'll be fine.



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