Sorry a private company can do whatever it wants with its own property. They're paying for the power and bandwidth...
This needs to be overturned unless LinkedIn is violating FRAND priciples.
U.S. judge says LinkedIn cannot block startup from public profile data
221–230 of 301 posts
Re: U.S. judge says LinkedIn cannot block startup from public profile data
#222Earlier 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…
The implication is that the company that serves public data could impose conditions on the use of that data, for example they could: 1. ban the use of ad blockers when accessing the data 2. ban users making an offline copy to view later 3. ban users from disabling auto play or other features 4. otherwise control what you do with data once you get it, which is *huge*. E.g. what if they want a 1% share of any revenue y…
Companies already do all those through technical means. In fact they have the full force of the law behind their efforts because they simply put some DRM on it and now it's illegal to try to circumvent.
I would LOVE it if the courts would remove the legal protections of DRM. It seems so strange that this court has gone so far in the viewer-rights direction, but hasn't bothered taking the baby steps to remove the legal protection of DRM.
Hmm, now I'm hoping LinkedIn implements some DRM so this fight can get truly interesting and maybe make some positive difference.
Re: U.S. judge says LinkedIn cannot block startup from public profile data
#223Earlier 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…
As a user, it's in my benefit if a competitor comes along, takes LinkedIn's data that they are freely publishing on the public Internet, and does something useful with it. The correct analogy would be if someone took a copy of my personal resume that I put online, freely accessible on the Internet and did something useful with it. Heck, Google does this already by indexing and providing a directory of public content.…
> As a user, it's in my benefit if a competitor comes along, takes LinkedIn's data that they are freely publishing on the public Internet, and does something useful with it.
In this case, it's not to _your_ benefit. They're going to warn your boss that you will quit soon.
Re: U.S. judge says LinkedIn cannot block startup from public profile data
#224Earlier 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…
>Based on that one statement alone, as an employee, I would be uncomfortable with the use of my data to supply my employer with my future plans before I choose to disclose it myself. That choice is mine, and mine alone; not something to be monetized simply because the option exists. What choice? The only choice you have is whether to post public info or not. You have no choice over what others do with it. You can't p…
The issue isn't that the data is public. The issue is the extraction of underlying behavior based on the spatial and temporal characteristics of the data being posted. E.g. the fact that I updated my profile on LinkedIn is not in question. But the underlying behavior is that the average user normally updates their profile around the time that they start a job-search. While this isn't true for every user, the use of an algorithm may turn up false positives, which may have unintended results, especially when this data is presented to your manager.
Secondly, while the updated profile is public knowledge, the temporal characteristics of the update isn't a feature that is directly published by LinkedIn. Call it a product feature; it is tailored to present the qualifications of a user, not to advertise the fact that they may be looking for a job. While one can argue that update is public knowledge, and must therefore be available for data-mining purposes, there is a subtle, but potentially dangerous leak of information here that is open to interpretation.
LinkedIn's position, that this leak may be potentially harmful to its users, and by extension, its core business, is therefore a fair point.
Re: U.S. judge says LinkedIn cannot block startup from public profile data
#225Will this mean Google search can now also be scraped.
Re: U.S. judge says LinkedIn cannot block startup from public profile data
#226Will this mean Google search can now also be scraped.
This is a preliminary injunction, which is a tool to prevent irreparable harm to a party before a case is resolved on its merits.
It shouldn't be taken as a strong indicator of what will be found legal in this case, much less a different hypothetical one.
Re: U.S. judge says LinkedIn cannot block startup from public profile data
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 who…
I'd argue if the data is being made publicly available (particularly in the case of LinkedIn where we are choosing to make our own data publicly available), it is being made publicly available, and anyone should be able to take and use that data. Our data shouldn't be what a corporation's profit (or loss of profit) is based on to begin with.
Re: U.S. judge says LinkedIn cannot block startup from public profile data
#228Earlier 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…
Though I disagree, I think basically understand your argument regarding why people should have to respect the wishes of a party when dealing with information that the party made public. What I cannot understand is how such a system could reasonably be enforced. Let's say John Doe posts his resume on a job board. If I print out his resume, but he later updates it, am I now somehow in the wrong for retaining the old co…
>What I cannot understand is how such a system could reasonably be enforced.
That would be a 26 billion dollar question, and one I would very much love to solve one day! :)
I believe that your example is fairly simplistic to capture the crux of the issue here. The metadata associated with posts often contain features that are quite revealing, but not necessarily the kind of data that the source would wish to be revealed. E.g. I have noticed multiple times that the number of cold emails I have received from recruiters is higher immediately after I update my LinkedIn profile, leading me to believe that the last-update timestamp is a feature that the LinkedIn search engine may be relying on to rank results. While my evidence is purely empirical, it isn't a stretch to imagine that it would be a reasonable thing to do, given that most users normally update their profiles when they are about to start searching for new opportunities.
On the one hand, this is a an excellent product that allows recruiters to reach targets that exhibit behavior associated with active job-seekers, resulting in better connections. It results in a win-win situation where the recruiter gets a pretty good return on his/her investment, and the target receives the attention/information they were looking for with their update. False positives in this situation result in a few unsolicited emails/unwanted attention.
On the flip side, this information can be repackaged to present a manager with a graph plotting the probability of an employee quitting. While this is a perfectly good product, no employee would every use a service that might reveal their future plans ahead of a time of their own choosing. Furthermore, false positives here can have a significant impact and LinkedIn may not remain in business for long if word of this product gets out.
Re: U.S. judge says LinkedIn cannot block startup from public profile data
#229Earlier quoted context omitted.
LinkedIn never said the data was 'public' in the sense that you are using it. You are assuming that just because it can be accessed for free, by anyone with an internet connection, that it is therefore in the public realm. That is incorrect.
As an example, is Netflix's collection "private"? If yes, would it still be if they charged only $0.01 for it? If yes, would it still be if the price was $0? It seems silly to me to have the "rules" depend upon the price.
The rules depend on whether something is copyrightable or not.
Movies are copyrightable.
Compiled catalogs of personal information are not (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications,_Inc.,_v._R...).
Re: U.S. judge says LinkedIn cannot block startup from public profile data
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, you can do things that don't constitute trespass. But unlike what's inside a store front, you can't observe the contents of a web server without interacting with it (trespassing).
This seems really annoyingly tied to the technology of the web. If the public, non-authenticated web was built on a broadcast mechanism (like radio) instead of a request-response mechanism like HTTP, then this argument wouldn't apply. Hopefully the court considers whether it actually behaves more like the former than the latter.
Even with request-response, I don't see how this would be to LinkedIn's benefit. Their server receives the request, and sends the response. If they don't want it to send the response, they can change it accordingly. If they send the response as usual, how could the request be trespassing?