SoylentNews

LinkedIn Cannot Prevent Access to Public Profiles

posted by martyb on Tuesday August 15 2017, @01:11PM   
from the bad-for-them-good-for-us-maybe dept.

tonyPick writes:

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.

---

Original Submission

• Re:Ramifications/implications Re:Ramifications/implications (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 15 2017, @04:09PM (1 child)

  by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 15 2017, @04:09PM (#554294)

  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.

  Parent

  Starting Score:	0		points
  Moderation		+1
  Interesting=1, Total=1
  Extra 'Interesting' Modifier		0
  Total Score:		1

• Re:Ramifications/implications (Score: 2) by tonyPick on Wednesday August 16 2017, @07:36AM

  by tonyPick (1237) on Wednesday August 16 2017, @07:36AM (#554594) Homepage Journal

  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.

  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....

  [Judge Chen concluded that...]
  When you publish a website, you implicitly give members of the public permission to access it, he ruled. Allowing website operators to revoke that permission on a case-by-case basis, backed up by the force of federal criminal law, could have serious consequences that Congress could not have intended
  ...
  Instead, Chen endorses an approach developed by Kerr that relies heavily on analogies to physical trespassing
  ...
  Chen argues that the main way websites distinguish between the public and private portions of their websites is using an authentication method such as a password. If a page is available without a password, it's presumptively public and so downloading it shouldn't be considered a violation of the CFAA. On the other hand, if a site is password-protected, then bypassing the password might trigger liability under federal anti-hacking laws.

  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...

  Parent