Abstract
This Note explores the growing legal and regulatory landscapes of web scraping in the United States and argues that web scraping should be regulated through a unified federal framework tailored to its unique technological and economic realities. Web scraping allows organizations to collect massive amounts of data essential to their operational needs—often without the consent of data holders. Thus, web scraping has become a powerful engine of innovation used across virtually every sector of the economy but with a serious risk to privacy and property interests. Yet the current U.S. legal framework lacks a coherent regulating structure. Courts and litigants are forced to rely on outdated federal law, state privacy laws, and various common law doctrines—none of which were designed to address web scraping.
Through a comparative analysis of U.S. and European law and a relevant case study, this Note suggests that the current U.S. approach is inadequate in protecting some of the most fundamental rights and interests. Instead, web scraping should be regulated through a unified federal framework, incorporating a tiered regulatory regime that distinguishes different types of data and methods of collection to balance innovation with individual rights.
Recommended Citation
Eunchong Moses Park, Scraping Bad: The Case for a Unified Scraping Framework, 83 Wash. & Lee L. Rev. Online 244 (2026), https://scholarlycommons.law.wlu.edu/wlulr-online/vol83/iss4/1
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Administrative Law Commons, Computer Law Commons, Intellectual Property Law Commons, Privacy Law Commons, Science and Technology Law Commons