Recently, there have been a number of cases in which programmers have been prosecuted and even sentenced for working on certain projects:

A programmer was caught writing software for someone else because he was contracted out and the software was used for gambling.

A company was caught using a crawler to crawl user information, leading to the company’s programmers being caught.

A P2P company was hit by a storm. The boss ran away and the programmer was arrested.

Doctor of university of Science and Technology sells “external hang” illegal profit more than 3 million, be arrested by police.

So, as a programmer, how do you avoid these pits? How can you protect yourself as much as possible?

This article from the crawler, gambling website, P2P and plug-in several directions to introduce, as a programmer how to avoid facing prison programming!

Since the author is not a professional legal practitioner, please correct any deviation in the references in the regulation section. Hope through this article can help the majority of programmers to understand what their personal freedom is closely related to the pit.

A, the crawler

Crawler is a widely used network information collection technology in the Internet era. This technology was first used in the field of search engine and is one of the supporting technologies for search engine to obtain data sources.

With the explosive growth of data resources, the application scenarios and business models of web crawlers become more extensive and diverse. The more common applications include the content aggregation and generation of news platforms, the price comparison function of e-commerce platforms, and the weather forecast application based on meteorological data.

Web crawler technology provides great convenience for data collectors and brings great benefits to professional web crawler companies. As a result, many companies have a crawler department, or a team responsible for developing crawlers, and there are job listings for “crawler engineers” on job websites.

On this question, it has always been difficult to define, because the reptile itself is just a tool, just like the kitchen knife, so many people take “the kitchen knife innocence”, “the technology innocence” to defend the reptile.

From the related cases of web crawlers, the developers and users of crawlers usually have many reasons to defend themselves:

“All I was crawling was public data on the site. Isn’t that what search engines do?”

“It’s similar to search engine behavior, but using automated scripts, it’s fair use behavior.”

“I have complied with their robots protocol. There is no robots protocol on this site.”

“I only use the data for personal research, not for commercial purposes.” .

So, do reptiles break the law?

At present, the restrictions related to web crawlers are mainly the Data Security Management Measures (Draft) released by the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) on May 28, 2019. This document mainly contains three chapters: data collection, data processing and use, and data security supervision and management.

What is certain is that if a crawler is used improperly, the developer of the crawler may be in violation of the law, and the penalty may vary depending on the circumstances.

To see whether the development and use of a crawler is illegal, we need to judge from three aspects: what data to climb, how to climb the data, and how to use the data after climbing. Here is a simple analysis:

What data is illegal to crawl?

(1) Works under the protection of copyright law

Because some websites publish content, such as articles, comments and so on are copyrighted, if only through the browser view is not against the law.

However, it is against the law to reproduce a copyrighted work for profit without the permission of the copyright owner.

According to the law of the People’s Republic of China copyright law article 46: the following the infringing act, shall, according to situation, to stop the infringement, eliminate the influence, publicly apologize and compensate for the losses civil liability, and may be confiscated by the administrative department of copyright to administrative penalties, fines and other illegal income: (1) plagiarism, copying a work created by others; (2) reproducing and distributing a work for profit without the permission of the copyright owner; (3) publishing a book to which another person enjoys the exclusive right of publication; (4) producing and publishing a sound recording or video recording of a performance without the permission of the performer; (5) reproducing and distributing a sound recording or video recording produced by another person without the permission of the producer; (6) reproducing and distributing a radio or television program without the permission of the radio or television station; (7) producing or selling a work of art with a fake signature of another.

It is a crime to use crawler technology to retrieve data and then save or distribute it for profit.

2. Users’ personal information or personal privacy

The personal information of individual users, even if the user put it on some websites for public or partial public, such as Weibo, wechat, etc., does not mean that these data can be freely obtained by others!

According to Article 111 of the General Provisions of the Civil Law: Any organization or individual who needs to obtain other people’s personal information shall obtain and ensure the security of the information in accordance with the law. No illegal collection, use, processing, transmission of other people’s personal information;

According to the “network security Law” Article 44: any individual and organization shall not steal or in other illegal ways to obtain personal information. Therefore, if the crawler crawls the user’s personal information in large quantities without the user’s consent, it may constitute illegal personal information collection.

So, if the data that crawls involves personal information, it is illegal!

Some crawlers attempt to circumvent the permission verification and crawl the user’s undisclosed information, such as personal private album photos, which is a violation of the user’s personal privacy, which is also illegal.

3. Data protected against unfair competition

There are many sites in which data is generated by users, and such data and content is the primary source of competitiveness of the plaintiff’s site. Such as store reviews and reviews on Dianping, and hotel reviews and reviews on Ctrip.

According to the “Anti-Unfair Competition Law” Article 2: in the market transactions, operators should follow the principles of voluntariousness, equality, fairness, honesty and credit, and observe the generally recognized business ethics.

So, without permission, to crawl to the core data of other websites, it is clear that the principles of voluntary, equality, fairness, honesty and credit are not followed.

In cases of unfair competition, public comment on v. baidu and sina weibo v affectionately unfair competition cases, the court has decided that the defendant crawl, use the plaintiff site without permission of the behavior of the data, in violation of the principle of good faith and recognized moral, damaged the Internet market competition order, damage of the plaintiff’s competitive advantage, thus constitutes unfair competition.

Therefore, if you grab the information posted by users on the UGC model websites such as Dianping, Weibo, Douban Movie and Zhihu, and publish or use such information in your own products or services, there is a great risk of unfair competition.

How is it illegal to climb?

Crawling public data would not normally be considered infringement. Google, Baidu and other search engines are so climb.

So, how on earth is it possible to violate the law to crawl the data? The main consideration is whether the following two behaviors are involved:

The Robots protocol is not complied with

Robots protocol is a mechanism produced in the technical world to solve the problem of the willingness communication between the crawler and the crawler through computer programs.

According to the “Internet search engine service self-discipline Convention” article 7: Robot protocol (robots protocol) refers to the Internet site owner using robots.txt file, to the Network robots (Web robots) give website instructions protocol. Specifically, the robots protocol is that the website owner prompts the network robot which pages should not be crawled and which pages can be crawled through the text file robots.txt located in the root directory of the website.

According to the Internet search engine service self-discipline convention article 8: the Internet station owners set the robot agreement should follow the principle of fair, open, and promote the free flow of information, and limit the search engine crawl due industry recognized reasonable justification, not the use of robots agreement for ACTS of unfair competition, actively encourage innovation, fair and healthy competition environment.

Although the “Self-discipline Convention on Internet Search Engine Services” is only applicable to members of the Internet Society of China and Internet practitioners who voluntarily join the “Self-discipline Convention on The Internet Industry of China”, in judicial practice, Robots protocol has been deemed to constitute the business ethics of workers in the search field of the Internet industry.

Therefore, the act of arbitrarily grabbing the website content in disregard of the Robots agreement set up by the website is suspected to constitute a violation of Article 2 of the Anti-Unfair Competition Law, that is, an unfair competition act that violates the principle of good faith and business ethics.

Bypass protection measures to data access, forced breakthrough anti – climbing measures

Because the batch visit of crawlers will bring great pressure and burden to the website, so many website operators will take technical measures to prevent the crawlers from batch obtaining their website information.

As a result, many crawler tools will find ways to circumvent the safeguards in order to crawl the data, but this can also break the law.

According to the second paragraph of article 285 of the criminal law, in violation of the provisions of the state, the invasion of the provisions of the preceding paragraph outside of the computer information system or other technical means, to get the computer information system in the storage, processing or transmission of data, or illegally control of the computer information system implementation, if the circumstances are serious, shall be sentenced to fixed-term imprisonment of not more than three years or criminal detention, and concurrently or independently be sentenced to a fine; If the circumstances are especially serious, he shall be sentenced to fixed-term imprisonment of not less than three years but not more than seven years and shall also be fined.

Attempt to pass technical means, bypass the anti-crawl mechanism of the website, belong to the “criminal Law” provisions of the “intrusion”, are to be punished.

How to break the law?

Many crawlers developed by companies comply with the Robots protocol and do not crawl the data that should not be crawled. Can the data obtained in this way be used freely? In fact, it is not. If it is not used properly, it will also break the law.

For example, it is possible to violate the law to make profits, harm others’ interests, fabricate, slander and so on through the data captured by the crawler.

In addition, without the consent of the person being collected, even providing the legally collected personal information of a citizen to another person falls under article 253 1 of the Criminal Law and may constitute a crime.

summary

In the process of using a crawler, the type of data that is crawled, the way the data is crawled, and the use of the data after the crawl are all potentially illegal.

Among them, using the data obtained by crawlers to make profits, harm the interests of others, unfair competition and so on are generally aimed at the operators.

But for programmers, if your boss asks you to develop a crawler that crawls users’ personal information or privacy, fails to comply with the Robots protocol and intentionally avoids the anti-crawling mechanism, it may break the law.

Three, gambling, S website

In addition to crawlers, recently a lot of programmers involved in the development of gambling sites, the final sentence of the news, then, if you participate in gambling, S feelings and other sites development, is it necessarily against the law?

According to the Opinions of the Supreme People’s Court, the Supreme People’s Procuratorate and the Ministry of Public Security on Several Issues concerning the Application of The Law in Handling Criminal Cases of Internet Gambling, the determination and punishment of the joint crime of opening casinos on the Internet are as follows:

Whoever knowingly provides the following services or assistance to a gambling website shall be deemed to be a joint crime of the crime of opening a casino and shall be punished in accordance with the provisions of Paragraph 2 of Article 303 of the Criminal Law:

(1) Providing gambling websites with Internet access, server hosting, network storage space, communication transmission channels, advertising, membership development, software development, technical support and other services, and the amount of service fee charged is more than RMB 20,000;

(2) Providing funds payment and settlement services for gambling websites and charging service fees of more than 10,000 yuan or helping to collect gambling funds of more than 200,000 yuan;

(3) placing advertisements related to websites, odds and other information for more than 10 gambling websites, or placing more than 100 advertisements for gambling websites in total.

In other words, if you are a programmer and you are helping a company develop a gambling website, as long as the company pays you more than 20,000 yuan, then you and the people who run the casino are in joint crime.

In addition to gambling websites, do not participate in the development of software related to pornography, gambling and drugs. It is possible to violate the law to provide technical support for illegal or possible illegal activities. Qvod is a good example.

So, programmers must stay away from gambling, pornography and other sites, and refuse to provide technical services for them.

P2P

Recently, P2P frequent thunder, because it is network lending, so the thunder of the company must be a programmer, so, for this KIND of P2P companies if involved in illegal, then participate in the development of the programmer is not an accomplice?

Some time ago, there are mai Mai users posted that “P2P company thundered, front-end programmer caught “:

For a short time, it has aroused a wide discussion. Some people think that the programmer is an accessory to the law by providing help, while others think that the programmer may not know that the company is breaking the law, so he is not guilty if he does not know.

So, about this situation, there are users on Zhihu to give professional answers:

“If programmers are simply responsible for development and only get a reasonable death wage, I do not understand the legality of the company and THE P2P policy, looking for a job is through formal channels.” Then it’s not an accessory.

However, if you are also in charge of other matters of the company, or you are not paid a dead wage, and you are not looking for a job through formal channels, that is another story. The important thing is that if you know your company is illegal, there is a crime involved.

Therefore, for programmers who do Internet finance, they need to know more about whether their company’s current main business is legal. Whether it involves illegal fund-raising, pyramid selling and other illegal activities.

plugin

Plug-in refers to the use of computer technology for one or more network games, through the change of software part of the program production and become cheating procedures. Making and selling game plug-ins will also be hit by China’s judicial authorities.

According to the different types of plug-ins made by developers, and the way of use, according to previous cases, it may violate the crime of illegal operation, the crime of destroying computer information system and the crime of copyright infringement.

Crime of illegal business operation

The appearance of such illegal behaviors as plug-ins seriously infringes on the legitimate rights and interests of game developers, operators and normal consumers, disturbs the normal order of Internet game operation, undermines the benign development of online game industry, violates national regulations, and the circumstances are serious, which should be punished in accordance with the provisions of item 4, Article 225 of the Criminal Law.

According to the “Criminal Law” Article 225: in violation of state regulations, one of the following illegal business activities, disrupting market order, if the circumstances are serious, shall be sentenced to fixed-term imprisonment of not more than five years or criminal detention, and shall also, or shall only, be fined not less than one time but not more than five times the illegal gains; If the circumstances are especially serious, he shall be sentenced to fixed-term imprisonment of not less than five years and shall also be fined not less than one time but not more than five times the illegal gains or be sentenced to confiscation of property:

(1) Operating without permission articles that are exclusively or exclusively sold or other articles whose trading is restricted by laws and administrative regulations;

Buying or selling import and export licenses, certificates of origin for import and export, or other business licenses or approval documents required by laws and administrative regulations;

Illegally engaging in securities, futures and insurance business or illegally engaging in fund payment and settlement business without the approval of relevant competent authorities of the state;

Other illegal business operations that seriously disrupt market order.

Crime of damaging computer information system

Some plug-ins will modify the network game operation data, interfere with the network game server computer information system function, harm the computer information system security behavior, in line with the crime of destroying the computer information system constitutive requirements.

According to the “Criminal Law” article 286: : in violation of state regulations, the computer information system functions to delete, modify, increase, interference, resulting in the computer information system can not operate normally, the consequences are serious, shall be sentenced to fixed-term imprisonment of less than five years or criminal detention; If the consequences are especially serious, he shall be sentenced to fixed-term imprisonment of not less than five years.

Crime of copyright infringement

Some developers illegally obtain the core program files in computer software that others enjoy, and then make plug-ins for profit. Although the plug-in program is not completely consistent with the official client program, the main structure and function composition are substantially the same. Therefore, the defendant’s behavior constitutes the illegal copying of computer software, and should be convicted and punished as the crime of copyright infringement.

According to the “Criminal Law” article 217: for the purpose of making profits, has one of the following infringement of copyright, the amount of illegal income is relatively large or there are other serious circumstances, shall be sentenced to fixed-term imprisonment of not more than three years or criminal detention, and shall also or only be fined; If the amount of illegal gains is huge, or if there are other especially serious circumstances, he shall be sentenced to fixed-term imprisonment of not less than three years but not more than seven years and shall also be fined:

1. Reproducing and distributing a written work, music, motion picture, television, video work, computer software or other work without the permission of the copyright owner;

2. Publishing a book with the exclusive right of publication enjoyed by another person;

3. Copying and distributing a sound recording or video recording produced by the producer without the permission of the producer;

(4) Producing or selling a work of art with a false signature of another.

According to article 218 of criminal Law: Whoever, for the purpose of making profits, knowingly sells an infringing copy as stipulated in Article 217 of this Law, if the amount of illegal income is huge, shall be sentenced to fixed-term imprisonment of not more than three years or criminal detention and shall also, or shall only, be fined.

conclusion

For the majority of crawler engineers, if the crawler you develop involves personal information and privacy, the crawler does not abide by the Robots agreement, and the crawler attempts to bypass the anti-crawling mechanism by technical means, it is a violation of the law.

For those enterprises that do crawlers, if it involves the content protected by copyright, the company’s trade secrets and other content, and it is used for profit or unfair competition, it is also not allowed by national laws.

There is also, “knowingly committed” things do not do, also do not have any luck, must stay away from gambling, S website, and refuse to provide any technical support for them.

If the main business room of the company is P2P, and you have participated in the development of P2P, then make sure to know whether the business of your company is compliant, if you find it is not compliant, you must leave as soon as possible. And don’t get involved in anything other than pure development.

Do not participate in the development of ‘plug-ins’. Learn to protect yourself!

If you are a programmer in the relevant industry described in this article, then I hope you can first find a lawyer to consult, whether they have touched the law, and how to avoid and escape.

This article has just covered a few of the common pitfalls, but there are many more that are happening and will happen soon, so instead of just writing code, I want you to look up and take a look at the product you’re working on, the company you’re working in, and the industry you’re working in.

As programmers, the technology at our disposal is the tool, so we have the responsibility and obligation to ensure that our tools are used correctly.

In the end, technology is innocent. People make mistakes.

References:

www.kwm.com/zh/cn/knowl…

zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/66997586

www.zhihu.com/question/37…

New.qq.com/omn/2017121…

The geek time – 42 speak dialect law: time.geekbang.org/column/arti…