Shouldn't LinkedIn simply introduce captcha?
U.S. judge says LinkedIn cannot block startup from public profile data
231–240 of 301 posts
Re: U.S. judge says LinkedIn cannot block startup from public profile data
#232From reading the ruling, the injunction was based on a finding that HiQ raised serious questions about whether LinkedIn blocking HiQ's scrapers constituted a violation of California's unfair competition law by violating the spirit of federal antitrust law. HiQ argued that LinkedIn has a monopoly on "the professional networking market" and is unfairly exploiting that monopoly to gain an advantage in the data analytics…
Great. So in a business that makes money primarily by collecting and selling user data, they're now required to give it away for free.
Correction: user-generated data. LI get the content from their users for free.
Re: U.S. judge says LinkedIn cannot block startup from public profile data
#233I'm confused. Is the judge saying that LinkedIn can't use the law to ban HiQ from scraping their profiles or that they can't implement technology to block scrapers? The former seems reasonable but the latter seems like an unjustified restriction on how they operate their site.
Looks like technology... Which seems strange to me.
Less strange given that LI is a monopoly and the judge was arguing that LI was unfairly restricting competition in HiQ's business space.
Re: U.S. judge says LinkedIn cannot block startup from public profile data
#234Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe the whole idea of copyright is flawed and harmful?
There's nothing wrong with copyrights; 14 year copyrights.
Why 14, though?
I'm well aware of the historical precedent, but that number was rather arbitrary even then - it was what a bunch of people agreed upon, based on their ideas and experience, and given the environment. It's doubly arbitrary today, considering how much the environment has changed. Is a 14-year copyright on software reasonable, for example, or too long.
Rather than making it a hard cut-off point, it would be interesting to come up with a scheme that attempts to capture the spirit of term limits.
Consider: why are copyright terms even a thing? Well, copyright is a monopoly on a thing that is not naturally restricted; it does not exist in the absence of society, and is therefore a privilege granted by that society. By itself, copyright is meant to encourage creativity in the interest of public good, and at the same time, to provide some means to derive profit from one's creative expression. So there are two conflicting interests at play here - the desire of the creator to be rewarded for the fruits of his labor, and the desire of the society to enjoy growing, constantly enriched culture. The copyright term, then, marks the point at which the latter trumps the former.
Instead, what we could do is capture the fact that the interests conflict. For as long as you hold copyright, you're effectively denying society the ability to freely enjoy the culture that you have enriched. Why, then, not tax the copyright accordingly? You could consider it a kind of intellectual property tax, but with a twist: the longer copyright is held, the more the interests of society are infringed, and the larger the compensatory payment required to maintain the copyright.
So we could start with a grace period of a couple of years that is completely free, then it starts growing steadily. For some really popular work that makes significant profits, the author could easily afford payments to maintain copyright for a decade or two (or however long - that is something that can be dialed arbitrarily). For things that are too obscure, payments would cease shortly, and they would fall to public domain. There wouldn't be such a thing as "abandonware" anymore.
What use to put the money to? Many possibilities there. Publicly sponsored arts and art education is an obvious choice. Another interesting example would be offering bulk sums of money to authors of culturally important works to surrender their copyrights sooner, so that the public can enjoy them.
Re: U.S. judge says LinkedIn cannot block startup from public profile data
#235I have a simple question: what is "public information" with respect to websites? Anything I put on a privately owned website automatically becomes "public"?
Re: U.S. judge says LinkedIn cannot block startup from public profile data
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 lega…
I'm not sure whether data like this can be copyrighted or is considered a creative work. The creative work would be things like the LinkedIn logo or graphics, and these fall under IP protections that limit what you can do with them even if they are freely available.
Re: U.S. judge says LinkedIn cannot block startup from public profile data
#237Earlier 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…
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…
The EU data protection law is sorta like this in theory. Users can't give up some rights.
Re: U.S. judge says LinkedIn cannot block startup from public profile data
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
that's against TOS for Google SERPs Showing different results to google than you do to users is called cloaking and it's not allowed
Definitely, but someone at LinkedIn could get in touch with their google contact and make it all work and follow the rules. https://support.google.com/news/publisher/answer/40543?hl=en Apparently, we had something similar at Demand Media before the panda update.
How does one build such google contacts if you are a seed stage startup? I understand it wouldn't be the same league as LinkedIn Reid Hoffman level contacts, but even some kind of contact at Google search?
Re: U.S. judge says LinkedIn cannot block startup from public profile data
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
Definitely, but someone at LinkedIn could get in touch with their google contact and make it all work and follow the rules. https://support.google.com/news/publisher/answer/40543?hl=en Apparently, we had something similar at Demand Media before the panda update.
How does one build such google contacts if you are a seed stage startup? I understand it wouldn't be the same league as LinkedIn Reid Hoffman level contacts, but even some kind of contact at Google search?
I wish I knew. Easiest way is to make a ton of money off google ads like we did. Even then it was hard to actually talk to someone - especially at YouTube. And they had an office a few floors up...
Re: U.S. judge says LinkedIn cannot block startup from public profile data
#240Earlier 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).
Making HTTP requests is the same thing as having rays of light reflect off the storefront, I'd say.
Actually, it's not. In your analogy, the storefront is completely passive and unaffected.
What is actually happening, is that somebody is walking into the store, asks a question about the stock or the price of the products on sale, which the store employee willingly answers.
Then, all of the sudden, the store wishes to control what you do with the answer that was willingly given to you.
This is clearly absurd - and so too is wanting to control what people do with publically-available HTTP data. If it's public, it's public.
I personally do feel that LinkedIn is within their full rights to attempt to detect and restrict content being served to screen-scraping agents, but they must then accept that screen-scraping agents must be allowed to use any means necessary to impersonate a "normal" user browsing the (public) information that they publish.
This can't be a one-sided freedom.