9th Circuit holds that scraping a public website does not violate the CFAA [pdf]

Post by bartread » Tue, Sep 10, 2019, 2:13 AM UTC

dickjocke wrote: post #78

meritt wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have to login to access the data, that data isn't publicly available, and unlikely to be protected by this decision. Page 31 of the filing specifically differentiates this case from one regarding Facebook: "While Power Ventures was gathering user data that was protected by Facebook’s username and password authentication system, the data hiQ was scraping was available to anyone with a web browser."

Wait, doesn't Linkedin have pretty strong authentication safeuguards to view user profiles. if you google someone and click their linkedin without being logged in to LinkedIn, you're always directed to sign up or log in to it. Twitter is the only example I can think of among the large social media sites that doesn't require you to be logged in to see profiles

Post by kabacha » Tue, Sep 10, 2019, 2:29 AM UTC

tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #156

Animats wrote: post #22

This action does more than that. The court left the preliminary injunction against LinkedIn in place: "The district court granted hiQ’s motion. It ordered LinkedIn to withdraw its cease-and-desist letter, to remove any existing technical barriers to hiQ’s access to public profiles, and to refrain from putting in place any legal or technical measures with the effect of blocking hiQ’s access to public profiles." So Lin…

Not allowing the CFAA to be (ab)used to attempt to make scraping illegal makes sense. However, how is it reasonable to force a web site to serve its contents to a third-party company, without being allowed to make a decision whether to serve it or not? Serving the web site costs money, and the scraper surely isn't going to generate ad income...

Post by qtplatypus » Tue, Sep 10, 2019, 2:34 AM UTC

alistairSH wrote: post #29

blackflame7000 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ahh so if a company leaks data it's the viewer's fault, not the companies?

Nobody leaked any data here. These were public profiles that were "controlled" by a robots.txt file. The judge appears to question whether robots.txt is sufficient to prevent scraping, or if a proper authorization step would be required. The best real-world analogy I can come up with... I post a No Trespassing sign on my garden, but don't fence/gate the property. Is it ok to access the property and take my tomatoes?…

Post by skybrian » Tue, Sep 10, 2019, 2:45 AM UTC

kabacha wrote: post #165

LeoPanthera wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does this prevent Google from returning captchas if you use a robot to scrape the search result pages, as they currently do?

I mean it should. That is also a huge anti-competitive action that just isn't pursued by anyone yet: google makes money of scraping and denies scrapers scraping them - that's all sorts of messed up. The problem is that someone would have to sue google first and no one will do that unless there's big business incentive and big business can already scrape the shit out of google. This is the weird thing about web-scrapi…

Post by Deimorz » Tue, Sep 10, 2019, 2:53 AM UTC

kabacha wrote: post #164

tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not allowing the CFAA to be (ab)used to attempt to make scraping illegal makes sense. However, how is it reasonable to force a web site to serve its contents to a third-party company, without being allowed to make a decision whether to serve it or not? Serving the web site costs money, and the scraper surely isn't going to generate ad income...

> However, how is it reasonable to force a web site to serve its contents to a third-party company, without being allowed to make a decision whether to serve it or not? Your statement makes absolutely no sense. That's not how internet works. If you serve something publicly you don't get to cherry pick who sees it. Not only it makes no sense technically it's also a huge anti-competitive case.