Is Pic Scout spying on people?

[Feniks]

I received my first GI-extorsionletter last month en the second one 4 weeks later.
I don't know anything about inf. tech., I'm educating myself af quickly as possible, so I'm probably asking stupid questions.
On the www I read very disturbing things, rumour goes around that PicScout is downloading a copy of your entire website, is that even possible, or legal?
Does this mean that they can use this data for future clients?
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100207125204AA1Id9a

[Robert Krausankas (BuddhaPi)]

I received my first GI-extorsionletter last month en the second one 4 weeks later.
I don't know anything about inf. tech., I'm educating myself af quickly as possible, so I'm probably asking stupid questions.
On the www I read very disturbing things, rumour goes around that PicScout is downloading a copy of your entire website, is that even possible, or legal?
Does this mean that they can use this data for future clients?
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100207125204AA1Id9a

yes it is possible to download entire sites, I have software that does just that..naturally I only use it for legit purposes...Picscout does indeed rummage thru all directory's looking for images, pdf files, and other files that may contain infringing material.. I would not label it "spying" by any means... Bootom line if you have anything on your servers that you don't want anyone to see, you need to password protect it.. Google the word "fusking" and become enlightened..

[Feniks]

Ouch!!
the reason I ask is that I had stored lots of stuff on the server, totally oblivious of the fact that people had acces to it.
When I put out a search for free images I downloaded everything I liked, and uploaded a copy to the server, not knowing all this so called free stuff apparently isn´t so free.

I´m Dutch, my english isn´t very good, when I see FREE, I think this means gratis. I feel really really stupid!

[Robert Krausankas (BuddhaPi)]

People should always read the fine print on these "free" sites..

[lucia]

On the www I read very disturbing things, rumour goes around that PicScout is downloading a copy of your entire website, is that even possible, or legal?
Does this mean that they can use this data for future clients?
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100207125204AA1Id9a

It is possible for a bot to scrape your entire website.  The technology certainly exists though a the webmaster or administrator can also organize things to make it more difficult (or impossible) to scrape certain things.  But basically: Generally if person can load a url on the web, a bot can also load the url. If the bot can load the url, it can 'scrape' that url-- which mostly  just means copying it.

Whether this is legal depends on the country and a variety of factors. But in the US it would probably be very difficult to win a suit for someone scraping a site though there might be situations where the level of scraping becomes illegal. (For example: If it was so severe that the scraper caused your server to crash. )  Just guessing urls or violating robots.txt are not illegal.

[Robert Krausankas (BuddhaPi)]

The other scenario would be if the bot/ crawler /scraper or what have you managed to get into a protected area via password hack or some other means, that would certainly be a legal issue, and easy enough to prove with raw log files, but again if the source is from nigeria or china, I highly doubt you'd have any legal recourse.