Oh you don't want your stuff scraped? Well then get the fuck of the public internet. Simple as that.
I'd have to agree with you. Public info is public info.
LinkedIn: It’s illegal to scrape our website without permission
201–210 of 303 posts
Re: LinkedIn: It’s illegal to scrape our website without permission
#202Hypocrites... They should have lost any legal ownership to information freely available on their site long ago when they decided it was ok to scrape private information from their users email accounts without authorisation.
Re: LinkedIn: It’s illegal to scrape our website without permission
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is an interesting fact.. LinkedIn broke the ruling against scraping they are relying on to prevent scraping.
Scraping would be forbidden via TOS; theoretically it would be the users giving access to linked in (who actually is bound by the terms) who would be liable, not linked in.
That still wouldn't prevent an entity (person or corporation) that never agreed to the TOS from scraping.
Re: LinkedIn: It’s illegal to scrape our website without permission
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is an interesting fact.. LinkedIn broke the ruling against scraping they are relying on to prevent scraping.
Scraping would be forbidden via TOS; theoretically it would be the users giving access to linked in (who actually is bound by the terms) who would be liable, not linked in.
If it's illegal to scrape without permission, that makes the behavior of scraping illegal. They are not claiming it's a TOS violation, they're claiming it's a CFAA violation, which is a federal statue and (theoretically) applies equally to everyone.
Re: LinkedIn: It’s illegal to scrape our website without permission
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think you've characterized this accurately. When you make an HTTP request to LinkedIn you are accessing their service. There is a long history of this relationship, you plug your house into the sewer line and you connect to the sewer service. You connect to the power pole and connect to the electricity service. You connect to the telephone pole and connect to the telephone service. Every service has "terms of…
I disagree with your analogy. To me, the key word in "HTTP request" is request . A request is something that can be granted or not.
True, but in making the request, you will provide information on who is making that request. If you say, "I am a bot!", and they grant you permission, your request is legal.
But if you say, 'I am NOT a bot', like spoofing a browser's user agent string, but you are a bot, then you are requesting access under a pretense, in order to circumvent their terms of service. Kinda feels morally wrong, and illegal.
Re: LinkedIn: It’s illegal to scrape our website without permission
#206Meanwhile LinkedIn was happy to scrape its users' email archives and contact lists. It would appear there's some karma at play here...
Seriously, they made it seems like I'm connecting with my contacts that have linkedin account already.
It turns out I was spamming my friends to get on linkedin because of them.
This was in the early days of Linkedin. That was such a douchey move, even if there was a warning their UI and stuff enable it easy to mass spam your contact list with 1-2 clicks.
Re: LinkedIn: It’s illegal to scrape our website without permission
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think you've characterized this accurately. When you make an HTTP request to LinkedIn you are accessing their service. There is a long history of this relationship, you plug your house into the sewer line and you connect to the sewer service. You connect to the power pole and connect to the electricity service. You connect to the telephone pole and connect to the telephone service. Every service has "terms of…
When you make a connection to the city sewers or to the power company, there is some kind of pre-connection step where the terms are presented and you agree to those terms. With HTTP and LinkedIn, there is no such step. There's no pre-connection agreement. LinkedIn could present such an agreement on first connection, but they do not.
When you make your conenction to Linkedin, What user agent would you provide? One that's blank, another that's "lelandbatey bot" or one that says, "Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; U; CPU OS 3_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile/7B405" ?
Re: LinkedIn: It’s illegal to scrape our website without permission
#208Yet another reason to shut down your LinkedIn account and walk away.
Re: LinkedIn: It’s illegal to scrape our website without permission
#209Does this case mean, if LinkedIn wins, I can write a cease and desist to Facebook, LinkedIn and Google to stop 'accessing' my PC with cookies and tracking my data?
Re: LinkedIn: It’s illegal to scrape our website without permission
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
Their desire to protect it is legit, but it doesn't necessarily give them a right to do so. A long time ago, companies that were compiling phonebooks also thought that they could use e.g. copyright to prevent others from using that compiled data for commercial gain. They were wrong, because copyright doesn't protect "mere aggregation" of data, as courts have ruled. In this case, LinkedIn is not arguing on the basis o…
Yes it's a consensus user-generarated content or facts are not liable to copy rights, I am not sure about the legality however it should not take long to prove as such. I meant there is nothing that LinkedIn 'created' out of that users data. But it's little complex or little immoral to steal users data hosted on their infrastructure that costs them a lot.
In US, it's an established legal fact.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications,_Inc.,_v._R....
(Note, HN strips out the trailing dot from the URL above.)