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.
(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...