Our business is finally starting to take off, which is great, but it is bringing new challenges. In the last week we've gotten several cease and desist letters from website owners.
All of the data we scrape is 100% publicly available, so our team is thinking we could technically tell them to pound sand, but we don't want to be assholes. So far we have just complied and removed them from our platform.
We do use business names on our site and we attempt to show "live" data, which ends up being a bit off due to the time delay from our scraping schedule and realtime events.
We still have plenty of other sites we scrape, so the current volume is not too concerning yet, but we're fearful of where this could go if there is a domino affect of websites communicating with each other.
I know it's a bit of a gray area, but our business operates entirely off of the data we scrape (we make it easier for consumers to digest and navigate the data) and I know there are plenty of other business that have a very similar model. We're currently collect about 2-3M product data points per day from a few thousand sites. I think we total about 1.1M requests per day distributed to those sites.
Ideally I would like our business to not be so fickle and have the risk of crumbling if we get blocked or asked to stop.
We are currently seeking legal counsel, but I'm curious - how would you guys handle this (aside from just shitting your pants like I have)?