Reuters has an update on the ongoing court battle between LinkedIn and hiQ Labs, and has issued a preliminary injunction stating that LinkedIn cannot prevent a startup from accessing public profile data
U.S. District Judge Edward Chen in San Francisco granted a preliminary injunction request brought by hiQ Labs, and ordered LinkedIn to remove within 24 hours any technology preventing hiQ from accessing public profiles.
The case is considered to have implications beyond LinkedIn and hiQ Labs and could dictate just how much control companies have over publicly available data that is hosted on their services.
There is additional background to this case from an earlier atricle at Ars Technica. TLDR version; HiQ scrapes data from public LinkedIn profiles, and then sells analysis of this data to relevant employers. LinkedIn claimed HiQ's access was not allowed and HiQ violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act as a result. HiQ sued, asking the courts to rule that they were operating legally.
Also at The BBC, with more details and background.
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Also at GeekWire and MSPoweruser.
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LinkedIn Apologizes for Attempted Privacy Breach
LinkedIn Cannot Prevent Access to Public Profiles
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 15 2017, @01:44PM
LinkedIn and equivalent companies operate under "your data is ours" and when someone else does it to them, they cry foul! This is why I block any access to domains like *.facebook.com (and their CDNs) and *.linkedin.com wholesale. If you behave like a fucker, then I won't talk to you and neither will any of the devices under my dominion.
(Score: 0, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 15 2017, @01:47PM (3 children)
Even techno-ignorant judges have more backbone common sense than those cunts at the W3C.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/07/amid-unprecedented-controversy-w3c-greenlights-drm-web [eff.org]
(Score: 4, Informative) by canopic jug on Tuesday August 15 2017, @05:22PM (2 children)
The AC was right, even if inarticulate and lacking sufficient explanation. When Encrypted Media Extensions push Digital Restrictions Management into the very web itself, all M$ has to do is turn them on and set them for limited use. At that point, even though other companies have the right to use the data, they do not have the right to violate the DRM technologies. That would put them into violation of DMCA and maybe CFAA and a few others.
The only way forward is to eliminate EME.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 15 2017, @11:47PM (1 child)
So you are saying the recent web changes allow the easy use of DRM when there is no actual R to M.
The would add the force of law to prevent use for stuff where use is otherwise fair.
Surely there must be something in the DMCA to prevent this.
If not, then maybe this use case is a test case for a DMCA takedown of the second kind.
That is a challenge to the overbearingness of the law.
(Score: 2) by canopic jug on Wednesday August 16 2017, @04:35AM
You have (still) many rights in the physical world in regards to information that in principle still exist in the digital realm. Time shifting, format shifting, first-sale, and other rights are being badly eroded and many people are happily contributing to that erosion by folding and going along with it.
However, although the rights still exist, digital technologies are being re-shaped to completely eliminate most of them in practice through a combination of corporate overreach and public complacence in the face of such overreach. Some encroachment is facilitated via the DMCA / EUCD and so on other encroachment is simply just the result of exploitation of problems designed into the new technologies.
DRM takes away your existing rights. If this is new to you then the EFF's web site might be a good place to start.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 15 2017, @02:10PM (5 children)
Does anyone have insight as to whether this is going to affect other sites like Amazon, who explicitly forbid the scraping of their listings, and Google, which similarly forbids the scraping of search results?
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday August 15 2017, @02:56PM (2 children)
Amazon doesn't maintain public profiles of it's customers, does it?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 15 2017, @03:45PM (1 child)
Public? No! Private, of course...
Oh, you didn't mean profiles as in "figure-out-what-the-maximum-price-point-is-that-schmuck-X-will-pay-for-this-gadget-dynamic-pricing"-profile... But, why didn't you say so...
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday August 15 2017, @04:13PM
"public profiles" such as Linkedin posts on their servers, easily browsed by members of the "public". It has been noted in TFS and/or TFA that Linkedin can be browsed without even logging in - it's very "public".
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 15 2017, @04:09PM (1 child)
I'd imagine the court logic was similar to sports stats or the moves of chess games. They're public domain statements of fact and so cannot be copyrighted. This is one area of copyright law that still seems to be on the side of the consumer since this has been repeatedly challenged over decades and the law is still crystal clear.
Google's results are the result of internal algorithms that present customized and unique results dependent upon a large amount of input data. I think it's safe to say that they're definitely still the property of Google. Love to hear the opinion of a lawyer on Amazon price listings though. No clue how that would go. It's teetering on that edge just between plain fact and creative result.
(Score: 2) by tonyPick on Wednesday August 16 2017, @07:36AM
Not sure the ruling would necessarily agree with that... this isn't necessarily as direct a copyright issue, since they're analysing the information, not replicating or producing copies as such.
there's a more in depth update over at Ars https://arstechnica.co.uk/tech-policy/2017/08/court-rejects-linkedin-claim-that-unauthorized-scraping-is-hacking [arstechnica.co.uk]
Quoting a couple of bits....
So basically if you can get there without any user authentication, then it's fair game to grab it and process it. This would include public Amazon price listings, Google Results, News sites, etc etc... Of course replicating and republishing it would get into Copyright issues, which is where you seem to be going, but that's a different thing, and IANAL either, so how that plays out I have no idea...
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 15 2017, @02:12PM
On the one hand what this company wants to do is kinda shitty on the other hand linkedin is kinda shitty.... Got it ! how about we take everyone involved in both companies and burn them alive in a pubic square as an abject lesson that attempting to steal peoples live and make them your proxy slaves is wrong
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday August 15 2017, @02:55PM (5 children)
Linkedin is pretty open, like Google. If they can decide that certain people and/or organizations are prohibited from viewing public pages, then you will commit a felony by doing a google search. Of course, there is DuckDuckGo, but that search engine relies on all the other search engines, including Google. So - Google decides it doesn't want people who don't support it's social engineering programs to use their services. Me, for instance. Yeah, that sounds really really good, right?
(Score: 1) by kurenai.tsubasa on Tuesday August 15 2017, @07:33PM (3 children)
It seems so many search engines point back to Google in some way or another. I'm guessing that DuckDuckGo doesn't rely exclusively on Google since it's possible to find on DuckDuckGo news articles that Google has disappeared (presumably because feminists and other SJWs are allergic to certain scientific observations). Has anybody compiled a list of search engines and to what extent they rely on Google?
A good subset of Google went in my hosts file last week (been using DuckDuckGo for a while now so barely noticed). I still need replacements for all of Google's services (Translate mostly… I'm assuming replacing YouTube is a lost cause—maybe I'll start using youtube-dl as my preferred YouTube browser), but right now Google is higher on my shitlist than Chick-Fil-A.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday August 15 2017, @11:17PM (2 children)
This quora link will be of interest to you - https://www.quora.com/How-do-Dogpile-and-DuckDuckGo-work [quora.com]
I just found this page, which is even more interesting - http://gadgets.ndtv.com/internet/features/12-things-duckduckgo-can-do-that-google-cant-596526 [ndtv.com]
(Score: 1) by kurenai.tsubasa on Tuesday August 15 2017, @11:35PM (1 child)
Thanks!
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday August 15 2017, @11:48PM
I just had a whole page filled with interesting stuff about DDG. Go to DDG (or just about any other search engine) and type "how does duckduckgo work". I just finished a tutorial on techboomer's site, and closed all the open tabs. There's a good deal of stuff I didn't know. There's probably more, but my time is limited.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 16 2017, @12:44AM
When I try to use Google via Tor I often get a 403 Forbidden error page; Yahoo's search engine often returns "error 999" which is their (non-standard) way of telling me the same thing. It's very common for Web sites to restrict access, such as by trying to prevent bulk downloading or "scraping." The judge understood that a bot crawling the site could overload it [squarespace.com] (PDF link). This is just a preliminary injunction; had it not been granted, HiQ might have gone out of business before the case wound up.