1 Introduction & Purpose

This section outlines Kadoa's commitment to ethical, responsible, and legally compliant web scraping practices. It serves as a guideline for our internal operations and for our clients utilizing the Kadoa platform. This policy has been developed considering relevant legal frameworks and reflects ongoing consultation with legal experts.

2 Core Compliance Principles

Kadoa's platform and operational procedures are built upon the following core principles:

• Ethical Data Collection: We design our systems to minimize impact on target websites and are following all industry best practices.
• Customer Control: Customers configure what, when and how data is collected. Responsibility for downstream use remains with them. We offer various automated safeguards to prevent accidental compliance violations.
• Transparency & Auditability: Clear identification of our scrapers through user agent strings. All platform activity is logged for compliance reporting and traceability.

3 Legal & Regulatory Framework

The legal risk associated with web scraping depends on several factors, including jurisdiction, nature of the data, method of access, an how scraping is conducted. Below is a non-exhaustive overview of the legal frameworks relevant to Kadoa’s services in the European Union, Switzerland, and the United States.

This section is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. Please consult your legal counsel for specific guidance.

3.1 Switzerland

As a Swiss company, Kadoa adheres to Swiss law. In Switzerland, web scraping is mainly governed by copyright law, particularly the Federal Act on Copyright and Related Rights (CopA). Several provisions shape what is permissible:

• Private use (Art. 19 CopA): allows individuals to use protected content for personal, non-commercial purposes. This exception does not extend to business or professional scraping.
• Temporary copy (Art. 24a CopA): permits short-term technical copies (e.g. browser caching) as part of lawful use, but not long-term storage or reuse of content.
• Quotation (Art. 25 CopA): permits the use of short excerpts from published works for purposes such as explanation, reference, or illustration, provided the extent is justified, the quote is clearly marked, and the source is cited.
• Database protection (Art. 39a CopA): even if individual content is not protected, collections of data may be protected if they constitute a substantial investment in selection or arrangement.

3.2 European Union

In the EU, web scraping and text-and-data mining (TDM) are primarily governed by national laws, but these laws are harmonized through EU directives, in particular the DSM Directive.

Under Article 4, commercial entities and individuals may mine data from publicly accessible content, unless the rightsholder has explicitly reserved their rights. A rightsholder is considered to have opted out of TDM when such a reservation is made through one or more of the following mechanisms:

• robots.txt exclusion protocols