The Legality of Scraping TikTok LIVE
A summary of my research on the legality of scraping TikTok LIVE data.
The Problem: Data Access
TikTok is owned by ByteDance, a Chinese company. Whether you subscribe to the belief that TikTok is influenced by the Chinese government, the fact of the matter is that of all of the major social media companies operating in the west, TikTok, owned by a Chinese company, provides the least open data access to its consumers, partners, and entrepreneurs working within its ecosystem. To utilize TikTok data, users must employ a data retrieval technique known as web-scraping.
Scraping: A Grey Area
Scraping is the act of programatically retrieving data, often in bulk, from websites. Doing so is important for researchers, businesses, and entrepreneurs, but opens up a can of worms involving intellectual property, privacy, and security.
Shockingly (or perhaps not so shockingly), there aren't any specific laws in the USA with regards to scraping. Instead, the current legal landscape seems to be a mishmash of case law with regards to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), a federal law that makes it illegal to access a computer without authorization.
As of 2025, scraping seems to be generally acceptable if the data is publicly accessible. That means that as long as you aren't logging into an account to access the information, it is generally considered legal to scrape content you can publicly access and are not violating some other law (i.e. intellectual property law).
This seems to be backed up by 2 recent cases:
What this does NOT mean is that you have the legal right to scrape any and all data. Videos and LIVEs on TikTok are the intellectual property of the creator and TikTok. Scraping them and redistributing them outside of TikTok is often a violation of copyright law.
Scraping your OWN videos and LIVEs, however, should be fine. Scraping videos wherein you have the express permission of the creator should also be fine. In my opinion, the best way to isolate yourself from legal concerns would be to implement a system that requires the user to provide express authorization to scrape their public data.
WITH THAT SAID, if you are a company, consult a lawyer. None of this is legal advice, it's speculation based on my personal research & conversations with developers.
The Takeaway
The TikTokLive libraries, while not affiliated with Euler Stream, use our service to generate URLs they can use to access public TikTok LIVE data. They are intended to be used by creators, developers, and entrepreneurs to build tools and integrations with data they have the intellectual property rights to.
Euler Stream does not endorse copyright violation and/or spam. You should always get permission before interacting with someone else's content. The TikTok LIVE libraries are designed to be used WITHOUT logging in so as to keep you, the reader, in a legally safe position.
Scraping law is confusing, and it's always best to consult a lawyer if you're unsure about the legality of your actions, especially if you will be deriving commercial benefit from them.
Be safe, and good luck!