LinkedIn Says It's Illegal To Scrape Its Website Without Permission (arstechnica.com)

A small company called hiQ is locked in a high-stakes battle over web scraping with LinkedIn. It's a fight that could determine whether an anti-hacking law can be used to curtail the use of scraping tools across the web. From a report: HiQ scrapes data about thousands of employees from public LinkedIn profiles, then packages the data for sale to employers worried about their employees quitting. LinkedIn, which was acquired by Microsoft last year, sent hiQ a cease-and-desist letter warning that this scraping violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the controversial 1986 law that makes computer hacking a crime. HiQ sued, asking courts to rule that its activities did not, in fact, violate the CFAA. James Grimmelmann, a professor at Cornell Law School, told Ars that the stakes here go well beyond the fate of one little-known company. "Lots of businesses are built on connecting data from a lot of sources," Grimmelmann said. He argued that scraping is a key way that companies bootstrap themselves into "having the scale to do something interesting with that data." [...] But the law may be on the side of LinkedIn -- especially in Northern California, where the case is being heard. In a 2016 ruling, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which has jurisdiction over California, found that a startup called Power Ventures had violated the CFAA when it continued accessing Facebook's servers despite a cease-and-desist letter from Facebook.

Comments

then dont' make it public

[Anonymous Coward]

don't make it public fi you don't want it read

Re:then dont' make it public

[BronsCon]

They don't want it read by companies that take the information and then sell it as their business model.

What do search engines do, then?

Re:then dont' make it public

[sexconker]

No, only one side has legitimacy.

If you complain about people using information you post PUBLICLY, you are an idiot.
This doesn't even rise to copyright infringement.

Re:then dont' make it public

[smooth wombat]

"we want to let search engines use it without license, but want to require a license for anyone else" attitude.

No, that is not correct. Search engines point to a page and may give a very brief line or so from the article, but one still has to click on the link to go to the real page and read everything.

hiQ goes to the Linkedin site and rather than pointing to the pages in question, takes the data, packages it, and then sells it to someone else, having left Linkdedin to do all the heavy lifting.

The two are not close.

Re:then dont' make it public

[alzoron]

This is not a copyright issue. This is a CFAA issue. It's been long determined that you cannot copyright facts. The CFAA deals with unauthorized access to computer systems. LinkedIn told these companies to stop doing it and they kept doing it That's a pretty clear case of unauthorized access.

Re:I've done several scraping projects

[Zero__Kelvin]

Which gives them standing in court. It *might* not be a crime but it creates a contract that doesn't exist without it. This is far from the first time a company has tried the old "The Internet doesn't work the same way for us as it does for the rest of the world. Callsies, no take-backs!" defense.

Re:This is bonkers!

[tattood]

Then blacklist IP's at the firewall(s) for endpoints that are scraping your site.

IP addresses are fairly easy to change. You can use something like TOR, so your public IP always changes.