Uber Faces FBI Probe Over Program Targeting Rival Lyft

Interesting to compare this to the recent LinkedIn case that favored web scrapers. Similar techniques, only difference is Uber's approach likely had a material impact on Lyft's service and cost.

I think I'm okay with this trajectory of scraping being legally acceptable so long as no meaningful harm is done to the entity being scraped.

This is generally how I've thought about it, too.

Intent clearly also matters, and is easy to infer in many cases - scraping information looks quite a bit different than feeding a competitor's dispatch database with garbage events. Although I would love to hear a creative lawyer's story about how that was actually benign.

If you're scraping data, make sure you go out of your way to be nice to their servers. With some fragile sites, it is easier than you think to knock them over, and you really want it to appear that you're going out of your way to not cause problems. (Also, look for another role - maintaining scrapers is miserable.)

Serious question, Who gets the proceeds of an eventual settlement? It appears that Lyft was hurt or Lyft investors and uber was committing essentially fraud. But I feel like these settlements are normally used to line the pockets of the regulatory and persecutory bodies.

These are two different things...

For a criminal probe such as this, any possible fines generally go into the administration's coffers. I know many people like to believe that prosecutors may be motivated by that money, the people making decisions on prosecution (US attorneys in this case) are so far removed from the general budget of the federal government that it's an absurd idea. The amounts are also negligible in the scheme of things.

Then, there are class action lawsuits, where the settlement is usually divided among a large number of citizen that were actually harmed, and a rather big chunk goes to the lawyer.

Note that the latter is also kinda how the system is supposed to work: almost by definition, class action lawsuits are used in cases where each individual was harmed only slightly, making an individual lawsuit too much of a hassle. The lawyers take on most of the risk of the trial.

In both cases, it's more important where the money is coming from than where it's going: the preventative effects of such costs far outstrips the importance of healing the actual harm that occurred.

At this point, it would be more newsworthy to see what Uber is not being investigated for.