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Ah, complaining when people look at the painting in your store front gallery on 5th avenue because you have to pay for the upkeep of the sidewalk.
Actually, no. It's more like complaining about others selling tickets to view said painting from the sidewalk. HiQ repackages and sells data it scrapes from LinkedIn.
It's like taking pictures of the paintings from the street, and reselling those pictures.
If they don't like that... that the painting down. Simple.
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That's a load of controversial hogwash. If you have permission to view the page, then you have permission to scrape the page. Anyone can make a LinkedIn account, ergo anyone can scrape any public profile.
People have gone to jail for it. https://www.wired.com/2010/11/wiseguys-plead-guilty/
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The pool has the right to kick you out, same as any website. The pool cannot call the police and charge you with a felony for misusing their resources.
Does the pool have any recourse if you proceed to bypass the ban? Do you have to re-enter to pool to bypass it, or does sending in confederates with their own badges to continue your work also bypassing the ban? How about sending in new motorized cars? The analogy is starting to break down, but I think it's still instructive for the problem of applying a simple first principles approach.
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The CFAA, which makes it a crime to access a computer system without proper permission.
That's a load of controversial hogwash. If you have permission to view the page, then you have permission to scrape the page. Anyone can make a LinkedIn account, ergo anyone can scrape any public profile.
I agree that what you say is the only sensible way to look at things.
Here's a few twists that would be interesting to see how they held up in court... * What if someone had a few oDesk workers to manually enter in the LinkedIn data? * What if someone wrote a scraper that parses the Google cache version of the public LinkedIn page?
The oDesk thing is allowed, I believe. Or at least can't be detected
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The bike example is a very poor analogy - the data isn't removed from LinkedIn, it's merely copied. It doesn't matter how many times the site is scraped, the data is unchanged and still available. A better analogy would be me taking a photo of the bike while walking past. It shouldn't matter how many times you tell me to stop, if it's on public property you can't really stop me from taking the photo. If you have an i…
> A better analogy would be me taking a photo of the bike while walking past. Taking a photo of the bike is also a poor analogy. Scrapers don't take one photo, they take photos of all the bikes. And scrapers don't keep the photos for themselves, they sell them for a profit. Also, the original bike isn't parked, it's placed in a gallery (probably with an admission fee? I don't know the business model of linkedin).
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The bike example is a very poor analogy - the data isn't removed from LinkedIn, it's merely copied. It doesn't matter how many times the site is scraped, the data is unchanged and still available. A better analogy would be me taking a photo of the bike while walking past. It shouldn't matter how many times you tell me to stop, if it's on public property you can't really stop me from taking the photo. If you have an i…
> A better analogy would be me taking a photo of the bike while walking past. Taking a photo of the bike is also a poor analogy. Scrapers don't take one photo, they take photos of all the bikes. And scrapers don't keep the photos for themselves, they sell them for a profit. Also, the original bike isn't parked, it's placed in a gallery (probably with an admission fee? I don't know the business model of linkedin).
Physical analogies for this kind of thing are always flawed, it's just dishonest/misleading to pretend that copying data is ever analogous to taking a physical object (the owner of the original is never deprived of the original when data is copied).
"I don't know the business model of linkedin"
Most of it is selling premium features to recruiters and other businesses. I'm not sure if Hi-Q's service interferes with that or not, but LinkedIn should not be trying to have their cake and eat it by leaving things in public then complaining when the public accesses it in a way they don't like.
If you post it on a public network, it is defacto, public. If you don't want it scraped, take it down, or put it behind a login. If the user provides the login to a scraper, then the scraper has permission.
What if the user is provided with permission to view medical records - your medical records for example? Would it be ok to scrape and sell those? What about children's school profiles and records?
If there is a problem with that, see the second line
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> A better analogy would be me taking a photo of the bike while walking past. Taking a photo of the bike is also a poor analogy. Scrapers don't take one photo, they take photos of all the bikes. And scrapers don't keep the photos for themselves, they sell them for a profit. Also, the original bike isn't parked, it's placed in a gallery (probably with an admission fee? I don't know the business model of linkedin).
So? How does this impact the bike owner in anyway?