Is web scraping illegal in Germany?

No. There is no German statute that prohibits web scraping. The Federal Court of Justice held in 2014 that scraping publicly accessible data is not unfair competition as long as no technical protection measure is circumvented. Liability arises from how you scrape and what you do with the data, not from scraping itself.

Is scraping personal data legal in Germany?

Only with a lawful basis under Article 6 GDPR, usually legitimate interests, plus the Article 14 duty to inform the people concerned. Public availability does not remove GDPR protection. German data protection authorities and the BGH treat unlawful scraping of personal data as a source of compensable damage.

Does §44b UrhG allow commercial web scraping?

Yes, for text and data mining of lawfully accessible works, unless the rights holder has reserved its rights in machine-readable form, for example in robots.txt or page metadata. The exception covers analysis, not republication of the scraped works.

Can I be prosecuted under §202a StGB for scraping?

Only if you overcome an access protection, such as a login, paywall, or deliberately placed technical barrier. Reading pages that are open to anyone is not Ausspähen von Daten. Circumventing a CAPTCHA or IP block designed to keep you out moves you towards the offence.

Do website terms of use bind a scraper in Germany?

They bind you if you agreed to them, for example by registering an account. Against a logged-out visitor, German courts have been reluctant to enforce terms that were merely linked in a footer, and the BGH treated the absence of technical measures as a signal that scraping was tolerated.

Is scraping for AI training legal in Germany?

The Hamburg Regional Court held in Kneschke v. LAION (September 2024) that creating a research dataset from scraped images fell under the research TDM exception in §60d UrhG. Commercial training relies on §44b UrhG and must honour machine-readable opt-outs. The decision is under appeal, so treat it as a strong indication rather than settled law.

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Is Web Scraping Legal in Germany? Laws, Cases and GDPR (2026)

Published 2026-10-11 · Updated 2026-10-11 · By the Scrapeshop team

Web scraping is legal in Germany when you collect publicly accessible data without bypassing technical barriers, do not extract a substantial part of a protected database, and process any personal data in line with the GDPR. No German law bans scraping as such. The risk sits in four places: unfair competition law, copyright and database rights, data protection, and the criminal offence of spying on protected data.

This guide covers the statutes and the decisions that matter, including the Federal Court of Justice’s 2014 screen-scraping ruling and the 2024 LAION decision on scraping for AI. It is general information current as of October 2026, not legal advice. For the cross-jurisdiction picture, start with Is Web Scraping Legal? What the Law Actually Says.

Quick answer

Scraping public, non-personal data in Germany is lawful. The Bundesgerichtshof (BGH) decided in Flugvermittlung im Internet(I ZR 224/12, 30 April 2014) that a portal scraping Ryanair’s public flight data did not breach the Unfair Competition Act, because Ryanair had not deployed technical protection measures and a contractual prohibition alone was not enough. Three things change the answer: circumventing a login, CAPTCHA, or deliberate block (§202a StGB and §4 Nr. 4 UWG); extracting a substantial part of a database built with significant investment (§§87a–87e UrhG); and collecting names, profiles, or contact details without a GDPR lawful basis and Article 14 notice. Commercial text and data mining is permitted by §44b UrhG unless the site has opted out in machine-readable form.

Which German laws govern web scraping?

Germany has no scraping statute. Six existing laws do the work, and each asks a different question.

Law	What it covers	What it means for scrapers
UWG (Gesetz gegen den unlauteren Wettbewerb)	Unfair competition between businesses; §4 Nr. 4 targeted obstruction	Scraping a competitor is not unfair per se (BGH 2014). Circumventing technical barriers or misleading users can be.
UrhG §§87a–87e (Datenbankherstellerrecht)	Sui generis right in databases that required substantial investment	Extracting or re-using a qualitatively or quantitatively substantial part infringes, even if individual records are unprotected facts.
UrhG §44b and §60d (Text und Data Mining)	Exceptions for automated analysis of lawfully accessible works	§44b allows commercial TDM unless the rights holder opts out in machine-readable form; §60d covers scientific research.
GDPR (DSGVO) and BDSG	Any processing of personal data	Need a lawful basis (usually Art. 6(1)(f)), an Art. 14 notice to data subjects, and a documented balancing test.
StGB §202a, §303a, §303b	Spying on data behind access protection; altering data; computer sabotage	Reading open pages is not an offence. Defeating a login, paywall, or targeted block can be.
BGB (contract law) and AGB rules	Terms of use as standard contract terms	Binding if accepted (account, checkout). Footer-linked terms rarely bind logged-out visitors.

What have German courts decided about scraping?

BGH, Flugvermittlung im Internet (I ZR 224/12, 2014). A flight-booking portal read Ryanair’s public website automatically and resold tickets with a surcharge. Ryanair sued under unfair competition law. The BGH rejected the claim. Screen scraping of freely accessible data is not a targeted obstruction of a competitor, and a prohibition in terms of use does not become a technical protection measure merely by being written down. Ryanair could have deployed technical barriers; it chose not to. This is the foundation of the German position: the burden of closing the gate sits with the operator.

BGH, Facebook scraping and GDPR damages (VI ZR 10/24, 18 November 2024).Attackers used Facebook’s contact-import tool to scrape phone numbers and profile data of roughly 533 million users. The BGH held that the mere loss of control over personal data is itself compensable non-material damage under Article 82 GDPR, awarding a modest sum without proof of further harm. The decision targets the platform, not the scraper, but it fixes the rule that scraped personal data is a damages event in Germany.

LG Hamburg, Kneschke v. LAION (310 O 227/23, 27 September 2024).A photographer sued the non-profit LAION for downloading his image to build a training dataset. The court held that the download fell within the scientific-research TDM exception in §60d UrhG, and discussed in obiter that a textual reservation in a website’s terms could qualify as a machine-readable opt-out under §44b. The case is on appeal to the Hanseatic Higher Regional Court. Until decided, it is the best available guide to how German courts read the TDM provisions.

Yes, but only within the GDPR, which German authorities enforce actively. A name, a business email, a LinkedIn headline, or a photo is personal data regardless of where it was published. Scraping it is a collection that needs:

A lawful basis. Almost always Article 6(1)(f) legitimate interests, which requires a written balancing test weighing your purpose against the reasonable expectations of the people whose data you take.
Transparency.Article 14 requires you to inform data subjects within a month that you hold their data and why. The “disproportionate effort” exception in Article 14(5)(b) is narrow and regulators expect you to document why it applies.
Data minimisation and retention limits. Scrape the fields you need, not the whole profile, and delete on a schedule.
No special-category data (health, religion, politics, biometrics) without an Article 9 condition.

The German state data protection authorities, coordinated through the Datenschutzkonferenz (DSK), published guidance in 2024 on training AI with personal data, and the European Data Protection Board’s Opinion 28/2024 applies in Germany. Both treat large-scale scraping of personal data as requiring a legitimate interests assessment and safeguards such as excluding sensitive sites and honouring robots.txt.

What about copyright and database rights?

Facts, prices, and specifications are not protected by copyright. Articles, photographs, and reviews are. Germany adds the EU database producer right (§§87a–87e UrhG), which protects a collection that required substantial investment to obtain, verify, or present. Scraping a handful of listings from a marketplace is fine. Copying the marketplace’s catalogue wholesale and re-publishing it is not. The test is whether you extracted a substantial part, judged by quantity or by the value of the part taken.

The TDM exception in §44b UrhG permits reproductions for automated analysis of lawfully accessible works. Three conditions: the content must be lawfully accessible (no circumvention), copies must be deleted once no longer needed for the analysis, and the rights holder must not have reserved its rights in machine-readable form. A robots.txt disallow, a TDM-reservation meta tag, or a clearly machine-parseable statement in terms of use can all count as a reservation. The exception covers analysis, not republishing the scraped text.

When does scraping become a criminal offence in Germany?

§202a StGB (Ausspähen von Daten) punishes gaining access to data that is specially secured against unauthorised access, by overcoming that security. Reading a public page involves no security to overcome. Using someone else’s credentials, bypassing a paywall, or defeating a block that was deliberately placed to exclude you does. §303a and §303b cover altering data and sabotaging systems, which is relevant if a scraper measurably degrades a service. Keep request rates modest and respect explicit blocks and you stay well clear of the criminal statutes.

Checklist for scraping German websites

Scrape only logged-out, publicly accessible pages. Do not circumvent logins, paywalls, CAPTCHAs, or targeted blocks.
Check robots.txt and page metadata for a TDM reservation before relying on §44b UrhG, and honour it if present.
Do not extract or republish a substantial part of a curated database. Collect the fields you need for analysis.
If any field is personal data, write a legitimate interests assessment, publish an Article 14 notice, and set a retention period before the first request.
Rate-limit to a level that cannot be mistaken for an attack, and identify your crawler with a contact address in the user agent.
Stop when you receive a cease-and-desist (Abmahnung) and take legal advice; continuing converts a weak claim into a strong one.

The engineering side of these rules is covered in Web Scraping Best Practices.

Frequently asked questions

Is web scraping illegal in Germany?: No. There is no German statute that prohibits web scraping. The Federal Court of Justice held in 2014 that scraping publicly accessible data is not unfair competition as long as no technical protection measure is circumvented. Liability arises from how you scrape and what you do with the data, not from scraping itself.
Is scraping personal data legal in Germany?: Only with a lawful basis under Article 6 GDPR, usually legitimate interests, plus the Article 14 duty to inform the people concerned. Public availability does not remove GDPR protection. German data protection authorities and the BGH treat unlawful scraping of personal data as a source of compensable damage.
Does §44b UrhG allow commercial web scraping?: Yes, for text and data mining of lawfully accessible works, unless the rights holder has reserved its rights in machine-readable form, for example in robots.txt or page metadata. The exception covers analysis, not republication of the scraped works.
Can I be prosecuted under §202a StGB for scraping?: Only if you overcome an access protection, such as a login, paywall, or deliberately placed technical barrier. Reading pages that are open to anyone is not Ausspähen von Daten. Circumventing a CAPTCHA or IP block designed to keep you out moves you towards the offence.
Do website terms of use bind a scraper in Germany?: They bind you if you agreed to them, for example by registering an account. Against a logged-out visitor, German courts have been reluctant to enforce terms that were merely linked in a footer, and the BGH treated the absence of technical measures as a signal that scraping was tolerated.
Is scraping for AI training legal in Germany?: The Hamburg Regional Court held in Kneschke v. LAION (September 2024) that creating a research dataset from scraped images fell under the research TDM exception in §60d UrhG. Commercial training relies on §44b UrhG and must honour machine-readable opt-outs. The decision is under appeal, so treat it as a strong indication rather than settled law.