is it legal to scrape 300,000 photos from a website, to post to your own website, under the guise of "fair use"?

AI Overview
No, it is highly unlikely to be considered legal under "fair use," and doing so carries severe legal risks.

Why This Fails "Fair Use"
Fair use is a legal defense evaluated on four factors, none of which favor this scenario:

Purpose of use: Copying content just to republish it on a competing website is not "transformative." True fair use usually requires critique, news reporting, parody, or research.

Nature of the work: Photos are creative works, which receive the highest level of copyright protection.

Amount taken: Scraping 300,000 photos represents a massive, systematic taking of entire works, rather than a small snippet.

Market effect: Reposting the images directly harms the original website's traffic, search engine rankings, and potential ad or licensing revenue.

Additional Legal Violations

Beyond copyright infringement, scraping at this scale usually breaks several other laws:

Breach of Contract: It violates the original website's Terms of Service (ToS), which almost always prohibit automated scraping and commercial reuse.

Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA): If you bypass technical barriers (like IP blocks or CAPTCHAs) to scrape the data, it can be viewed as unauthorized computer access.

Trademark Infringement: If the scraped photos contain logos or watermarks, displaying them can confuse users about the source of the content.

The Consequences

If the copyright holder takes action, the penalties can be devastating:

Statutory Damages: For registered copyrights, courts can award between $750 and $30,000 per work, climbing up to $150,000 per work for willful infringement. Multiplying this by 300,000 results in billions of dollars in potential liability.

Injunctions: Courts will issue immediate orders to take down your website.

DMCA Takedowns: The original owner can contact your hosting provider to shut your site down without a lawsuit.