That would probably as big or bigger project than the entire rest of the app itself, and since it is such a single developer and not a super profitable app it likely makes no sense to do this.
SerpAPI is a convenient wrapper API for scraping various sites. I assume they've vetted all the legality of things. They have a YouTube API: https://serpapi.com/yelp-search-api
Still they have a boilerplate ToS with some glaring mistakes:
> These Terms of Service and any separate agreements whereby we provide you Services shall be governed by and construed in accordance with the laws of 5540 N Lamar Blvd #12, Austin, TX, 78756, United States. (sic)
In that case, the court found 3Taps was criminally guilty for scraping publicly available craigslist data while logged out because 3Taps knew their use was not authorized.
This person has just received an email from Yelp telling them their free usage is not authorized, so circumventing that may well be illegal, now that they've been given that sort of communication, even if it might be questionably legal for other serpapi users.
The courts are altering their views on scrapping. This [0] is a good paper that explored the last 20 years of rulings (although it hasn't been updated with the most recent cases).
It is in Illinois. Their Computer Tampering law specifically makes violation of a web sites ToS punishable by up to 5 years in prison. Probably other states have similar.
Typically for copyright infringement. They'll sue you for the maximum legal damages possible per copy, multiplied by the number of times your bot loaded a page, probably in the trillions of dollars.
I'm happy to write code to let users circumvent the restrictions put in place by assholes, as long as it doesn't end up getting them in legal trouble I'm fine with it. If companies like google don't want people to try and screw them over, I suggest they offer an olive branch and stop being unethical jerks.
Coprporations (or other organiztions or individuals) can make things available to the public without completely ceding control over how they are used.
Imagine a landowner who allows public access to hikers using defined trails but no overnight camping. That's legal and just has to be posted. If you don't like it, don't use it.
Not sure why this is getting downvoted, because it's a reasonable question - the answer being that such scraping requires a lot more time and technical expertise to engineer than a simple API call. Also devolves into a cat and mouse game between your application's backend and whatever proxy they put in front of yelp like cloudflare, which you'll probably lose or will be prohibitively expensive.
