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U.S. judge says LinkedIn cannot block startup from public profile data

reuters.com

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Re: U.S. judge says LinkedIn cannot block startup from public profile data

#81

Post by [deleted] »

redial wrote: post #73
anandsuresh wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a tricky issue that has more to do with user psychology than technology. While the data is public, most users do not understand the persistence characteristics of data, especially in the presence of 3rd parties. In a world where there are no (persistent) copies made by third-parties, the user still is in control of the visibility of their data by updating their profile directly on LinkedIn to show/hide pieces…

Then don't make your profile public. You can't expect someone to forget you once had a bad haircut just because you now got a really cool one.

[deleted]

Re: U.S. judge says LinkedIn cannot block startup from public profile data

#82

Post by dahart »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #62
dahart wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Being a programmer not a lawyer, I like the idea of more rights for scrapers. What rights should scrapers have that they don't right now? Keep in mind that a lot of the scraping going on is just some other private company abusing access and hoping to gather and use the information for their own private profit. How many companies are scraping StackOverflow for example and doing nothing but attempting to copy it and…

Consider that should anything ever happen to the sites they scrape, suddenly they become super valuable to the rest of us. Decentralized information is not a bad thing. And arguably, if monetizing those scraped sites pay for them duplicating the data to additional places, I think that's probably fine. Arguably, if they do a better job getting that information in results to people who need it in search, they may be pe…

> Consider that should anything ever happen to the sites they scrape, suddenly they become super valuable to the rest of us.

That may well be true, but that value doesn't mean anyone should just be able to take that value from the company that put up the effort and investment to collect the data, and turn around an use it for their own profit. Nor does it mean that a company shouldn't be able to serve the data to whomever it wants and/or restrict access from whomever it wants. Value to the consumer is still not a reason to compel private companies to offer public services. It would be valuable to both of us if Google gave us free money, but no court is going to compel them to do so just because of the potential value to you and me.

It seems bad, btw, if we choose to rely on private companies to keep the only backups of our personal data. If a site going down has a negative effect on my life, and takes down data with it that I need, it might be an indication that I shouldn't have kept my data there.

Also true that decentralized information is not a bad thing, as a generic ideal or a data backup plan. But for a business, decentralization in this context means loss of profit, as well as possibly theft, cheating, and copyright violation.

Also, the increased value that comes from a company folding will be used against you by these private, for profit scrapers. They can and will hold their copy ransom for more money, if possible.

> Arguably, if they do a better job getting that information in results to people who need it in search, they may be performing a service there as well. (A lot of decently informative sites have absolutely awful search/visibility.)

What is the argument in favor of this being legal? It is currently not legal, and the law currently does not give any credit for 'doing it better'. Why should it?

Re: U.S. judge says LinkedIn cannot block startup from public profile data

#83

Post by Maultasche »

rev_bird wrote: post #30
smegel wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a website puts something on the public internet, it should not even be aware if it is being accessed by a scraper or a human. Maybe we should just ban User Agent strings and be done with it.

I'd be willing to bet that the user-agent field isn't the problem; it's patterns that everything looks for now, right? People have been lying in the request headers for decades.

Yeah, I remember a plugin in the early days of Firefox that allowed Firefox pretend to be Internet Explorer. It would send request headers that made it appear to be IE.

There were websites at the time that would display just fine in Firefox, but would refuse to display anything if they detected a non-IE browser.

Re: U.S. judge says LinkedIn cannot block startup from public profile data

#84

Post by biocomputation »

tomc1985 wrote: post #61
FLUX-YOU wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't trust the US government to write good rights for scrapers. They can't even do computer crime sentences well. At best, it's a burden for no solid gain for society. At worst, there will be loopholes used to DoS businesses because they can't shut down individuals due to law-given rights, and that will lead to court fights. These rights would do nothing but save scraper authors from learning to obfuscate their ac…

Information wants to be free. People should stop fighting it! If one makes information "public" but don't really want to share it, then the public is fully justified in taking it.

That's why you routinely publish your bank account, social insurance, and credit card details online, right?

Re: U.S. judge says LinkedIn cannot block startup from public profile data

#85

Post by gizmodo59 »

sabujp wrote: post #71
PatrickAuld wrote: post #23

> “We will continue to fight to protect our members’ ability to control the information they make available on LinkedIn.” LinkedIn has full control over this, it's their site. What they are fighting for is the ability to choose who gets public access to various pieces of information; which its member do not get control over.

This is still very confusing, why didn't they completely block it from scraping without a login?

Because they won't get the traffic from search engines. Searching for a full name very often leads to a LinkedIn page in top 10 results.

Re: U.S. judge says LinkedIn cannot block startup from public profile data

#86

Post by driverdan »

rickpmg wrote: post #66
iamleppert wrote: post #51

I fully support this decision. If you're offering a service that is public, with the intent to your users that such information will be available publicly, you cannot then police what users of that data you consider to be "public" because it serves your business interest. LinkedIn, of course, wants to get all the benefit of the public Internet with providing as little as they can. This, coming from someone who used t…

I have no love for linkedin, but not sure of your position. They collected the data, host it, etc, and incur costs for doing so. Just because they allow the public to access it, doesn't mean the public should have a right to re-use it. People argue that the data is public. I say that's not the issue. While the data itself might be available elsewhere, it is raiding the _collection_ of it that is being argued, not tha…

> They collected the data

No they didn't. Users input most of their data.

Re: U.S. judge says LinkedIn cannot block startup from public profile data

#87

Post by cabalamat »

iamleppert wrote: post #51

I fully support this decision. If you're offering a service that is public, with the intent to your users that such information will be available publicly, you cannot then police what users of that data you consider to be "public" because it serves your business interest. LinkedIn, of course, wants to get all the benefit of the public Internet with providing as little as they can. This, coming from someone who used t…

> If you're offering a service that is public, with the intent to your users that such information will be available publicly, you cannot then police what users of that data you consider to be "public" because it serves your business interest.

I wonder if the same ruling would apply to companies using Twitter's data feed? If so, it would be important in breaking open data silos.

Re: U.S. judge says LinkedIn cannot block startup from public profile data

#88

Post by EGreg »

nine_k wrote: post #79
syshum wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One solution to both HIq labs and linked in is to give users, not these companies, some kind of ownership over their data. Instead of having information about you be owned by which ever corporation collects it, have it at all times be owned by you. While there are some clear problems with this approach, something needs to be done about companies building databases of ruin where every moment everyone lives from the da…

Data you own is not public, by definition. This needs to be made abundantly clear. Something like "all rights reserved" on images.

As usual this is the "copyright" debate.

So is your public profile copyrighted by you?

The actual server is controlled by you or gives you a way to take the data down. But by then it could have been republished elsewhere!

Re: U.S. judge says LinkedIn cannot block startup from public profile data

#89

Post by EGreg »

redial wrote: post #76
rickpmg wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no love for linkedin, but not sure of your position. They collected the data, host it, etc, and incur costs for doing so. Just because they allow the public to access it, doesn't mean the public should have a right to re-use it. People argue that the data is public. I say that's not the issue. While the data itself might be available elsewhere, it is raiding the _collection_ of it that is being argued, not tha…

> Just because they allow the public to access it, doesn't mean the public should have a right to re-use it. That is exactly what public means. Do not make it public if you don't want 'the public' to use it.

Let me replace the word "re-use" with "re-publish". Does your analysis change at all?

Re: U.S. judge says LinkedIn cannot block startup from public profile data

#90

Post by flashman »

jlarocco wrote: post #70
djsumdog wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It gets into the incredibly murky water of how the web works. You're just issuing a request and getting things back. Sometimes in a web browser, sometimes not. But the content itself may still be copyright. You can't just take it, even though for now, the publisher/server is allowing you to view it for free. But what if you only chose to view some of the content (e.g. block ads). What if you apply your own styles to…

> It gets into the incredibly murky water of how the web works. There's no "murky water" in how the web works. It's very clear and precise, and anybody can learn how it works. It has to be precise and well defined, because computers can't operate any other way. If Linkedin doesn't want "public" profile data to be accessible to everybody then they need to stop calling it public and put it behind some kind of access co…

Computers are also operating with absolute clarity and precision when somebody exploits a flaw in their software to execute arbitrary code. That's why the CFAA has its language around 'exceeding authorized access' (even though it turns out that definition is dangerously vague).
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