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from the getting-out-of-a-tight-scrape dept.
Web Scraping Doesn't Violate Anti-Hacking Law, Appeals Court Rules :
Scraping a public website without the approval of the website's owner isn't a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, an appeals court ruled (pdf) on Monday. The ruling comes in a legal battle that pits Microsoft-owned LinkedIn against a small data-analytics company called hiQ Labs.
HiQ scrapes data from the public profiles of LinkedIn users, then uses the data to help companies better understand their own workforces. After tolerating hiQ's scraping activities for several years, LinkedIn sent the company a cease-and-desist letter in 2017 demanding that hiQ stop harvesting data from LinkedIn profiles. Among other things, LinkedIn argued that hiQ was violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, America's main anti-hacking law.
This posed an existential threat to hiQ because the LinkedIn website is hiQ's main source of data about clients' employees. So hiQ sued LinkedIn, seeking not only a declaration that its scraping activities were not hacking but also an order banning LinkedIn from interfering.
A trial court sided with hiQ in 2017. On Monday, the 9th Circuit Appeals Court agreed with the lower court, holding that the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act simply doesn't apply to information that's available to the general public.
"The CFAA was enacted to prevent intentional intrusion onto someone else's computer—specifically computer hacking," a three-judge panel wrote. The court notes that members debating the law repeatedly drew analogies to physical crimes like breaking and entering. In the 9th Circuit's view, this implies that the CFAA only applies to information or computer systems that were private to start with—something website owners typically signal with a password requirement.
Information wants to be free.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday September 10 2019, @01:38PM (4 children)
S'basically what we tell anyone scraping our stuff here for most any purposes. As long as you're limiting it so it doesn't qualify as a DoS, rock on with your bad self. I'd personally probably call Douchebag if they're just mirroring the site under a different name without attribution or pulling the entire site down several times a day but this is public data, most of which we don't even hold the copyright on.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 10 2019, @02:18PM (3 children)
yet if I scrape audio facts from a Spotify feed or video facts from a YouTube video I'm guilty of copyright infringement. Especially if I republish what I just scraped..
Just saying...
just trying to point out what seems to be stupid line of attack from Microsofrmt they should've slapped them with robo-DCMA violation notices. and stupid dichotomy between texturally presented information vs non-textually presented information.
but maybe this ruling could be used to allow good samaritan subtitle providers some safe haven...
(Score: 3, Insightful) by terrab0t on Tuesday September 10 2019, @03:04PM
LinkedIn argued that hiQ violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, not that they violated copyright.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday September 10 2019, @03:05PM
Nah, this ruling has fuck-all to do with copyright, only the CFAA.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 10 2019, @03:22PM
No, you're not. Facts are not copyrightable. A given presentation of them is. The feed or the video itself is the presentation. The layout of the text can be copyrighted. That's not what they were doing here.
If I were to go to some other website and say
That's not cricket. If I go to some other website and write a post saying, "Anonymous Coward said scraping and especially republishing Spotify feeds or YouTube videos makes one guilty of copyright infringement, Microsoft should have just sent a takedown notice, and questioned the difference between text and nontext information presentation." then I am fine even if it is still factually wrong.