Study On The Limits Of Criminal Laws And Regulations For Web Crawlers

Web crawler is an automated data scraping technology,which was first used in the field of search engines and has now been widely used in data scraping between enterprises.The technical nature of web crawler determines its neutrality,but the application of web crawler technology in practice makes it present the dual aspects of“beneficial” and “harmful”.The “benefit” of web crawler is shown in that it can greatly improve work efficiency and promote the flow and utilization of data;the“harm” of web crawler is shown in that improper application of this technology may cause harm to the interests of individuals,enterprises and even the country.The duality of web crawler technology should be viewed correctly,and its “beneficial”side should be maximized,while its “harmful” side should be curbed.From the perspective of judicial practice,our country’s legal regulation of web crawler technology has generally shown a strict trend from civil law regulation based on breach of contract and agreement,to anti-unfair competition law regulation,and then to criminal law regulation.In particular,the criminal law regulation of web crawler technology shows a tendency to be stricter,which is likely to cause the“chilling effect” of the application of web crawler technology,which is not conducive to the effective release of the potential of data elements.Through the analysis of relevant judicial cases of our country’s web crawler technology,it is found that our country’s criminal law regulation of web crawler technology is mainly based on the amount of data crawled by the web crawler and the actual damage caused by it to determine whether to commit a crime and the severity of the sentence.There is a lack of clear and detailed in-depth analysis of whether the crawled data is public and the definition of unauthorized crawling data.Through the analysis of the HIQ LABS V.LINKEDIN case,a typical case of web crawler regulation in the United States,it is found that the judicial attitude towards web crawler in the United States is changing from a stricter to a looser judicial stance.U.S.judicial practice fully considers the types of data captured by web crawlers,and treats public data and non-public data differently.For the plaintiff’s defense of unauthorized access to its platform data,the court analyzed and defined unauthorized access,narrowing the scope of unauthorized access.The judicial regulation of web crawlers in the United States is in sharp contrast with the relevant judicial practice in our country,and it is worthy of our reflection and reference.our country’s criminal law regulation of web crawler behavior does not reflect the modesty of criminal law,but to a certain extent reflects the excessive involvement of criminal law in data governance.our criminal law regulation on web crawlers should be transformed from “controlling standards” to “technical standards” that are more conducive to data flow and utilization,and at the same time,it should distinguish between “illegal conduct” and “illegal objects”.