While web scraping is not inherently illegal, how it is conducted and the data's subsequent use can raise legal and ethical concerns. Actions such as scraping copyrighted content and personal information without consent or engaging in activities that disrupt the normal functioning of a website may be deemed illegal.

Some of the main use cases of web scraping include price monitoring, price intelligence, news monitoring, lead generation, and market research among many others. In general, it is used by people and businesses who want to make use of publicly available web data to generate valuable insights and make smarter decisions.

Beautiful Soup is a Python package for parsing HTML and XML documents. It creates a parse tree for parsed web pages based on specific criteria that can be used to extract, navigate, search, and modify data from HTML, which is mostly used for web scraping.