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Congrats! Web scraping is legal! (US precedent)
111–120 of 409 posts
Re: Congrats! Web scraping is legal! (US precedent)
#112The toxicity towards web-scraping is really what makes me lose hope in the current web. People want their data to be public and all of the benefits that comes with public data but then they want to chose who gets to see it - it's a complete and utter paradox. This precedent doesn't really mean much but is definitely step in the right direction.
One of my clients is involved in property tax collection and reporting. Property Tax records are public info, and their website allows looking up the records for any property without a login. However, the data behind this website it the _source_ of the public records, and not the public records themselves (which would be local government databases). For years now we've been in an arms race with someone using a botnet…
Yeah, the real problem with scraping is that it's often done very haphazardly and bluntly. Sometimes it's very difficult to tell the difference between a scraper and someone trying to DOS your site.
Re: Congrats! Web scraping is legal! (US precedent)
#113The title of this post is misleading. The Court's decision related to HiQ's attempt to obtain a preliminary injunction. It's clearly an initial victory for hiQ in that the Court affirmed granting an injunction based on a significant likelihood that hiQ would ultimately prevail and that HiQ would suffer irreparable damage if the injunction was not granted. However, the Court never actually dealt with the merits of the case and, accordingly, stating that the case has precedential value is misleading. The Court itself noted:
"At this preliminary injunction stage, we do not resolve the companies’ legal dispute definitively, nor do we address all the claims and defenses they have pleaded in the district court. Instead, we focus on whether hiQ has raised serious questions on the merits of the factual and legal issues presented to us, as well as on the other requisites for preliminary relief."
Re: Congrats! Web scraping is legal! (US precedent)
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
Probably not. Facts aren't copyrightable but creative works are. So prices on Amazon.com are facts. User reviews are creative so probably copyrighted. Similarly the videos on YouTube are copyrighted. However the number of views and the number of likes are probably scrapable.
See that's where I have problem with this. Isn't data just _data_? Lets draw some pararells to real life. If I go to public space like town square - can't I take pictures, notes and records then go home and draw my analytics from it? What if I read something in a book I bought, can't I quote it? Same thing should be with web resources even if they are creative - as long as I don't publish them I should be able to scr…
> Isn't data just _data_?
Think of Law around data as using dependent types. The legal protections depend on the type of the data, and the type depends on the content (among other things). You have to determine the type BEFORE you can tell what the law says about it, since the law only cares about the type. You could probably encode the law nicely with something like Idris, but any "code as law" type governance system without dependent types won't be able to express existing law.
Re: Congrats! Web scraping is legal! (US precedent)
#115One question to those who dislike web scraping as they deem it infringes copyright laws. Given that Google scrapes LinkedIn public profiles and add data from it to it’d index and when presenting search results, is it then not discrimination that Microsoft tries to block HiQ and not google?
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Re: Congrats! Web scraping is legal! (US precedent)
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
Probably not. Facts aren't copyrightable but creative works are. So prices on Amazon.com are facts. User reviews are creative so probably copyrighted. Similarly the videos on YouTube are copyrighted. However the number of views and the number of likes are probably scrapable.
See that's where I have problem with this. Isn't data just _data_? Lets draw some pararells to real life. If I go to public space like town square - can't I take pictures, notes and records then go home and draw my analytics from it? What if I read something in a book I bought, can't I quote it? Same thing should be with web resources even if they are creative - as long as I don't publish them I should be able to scr…
As far as law is concerned, data is not just data -- bits have colour:
Re: Congrats! Web scraping is legal! (US precedent)
#117The toxicity towards web-scraping is really what makes me lose hope in the current web. People want their data to be public and all of the benefits that comes with public data but then they want to chose who gets to see it - it's a complete and utter paradox. This precedent doesn't really mean much but is definitely step in the right direction.
> People want their data to be public and all of the benefits that comes with public data but then they want to chose who gets to see it - it's a complete and utter paradox. That's a complete misconception. Of course you can find manufacture inconsistent ideologies if you combine ideas from different people, but I think you'd have a difficult time finding one person who believes what you just described. What I want i…
What if the organization is one person in an LLC? Do they get rights? If so then a big company can hire a bunch of little LLCs to act as rights-having proxies for any task that requires them.
Re: Congrats! Web scraping is legal! (US precedent)
#118I have a feeling this precedent makes Google happy, if not that they helped hiQ. While scraping should be legal, nobody should be preventing server owners from using any countermeasures they like
Re: Congrats! Web scraping is legal! (US precedent)
#119"HiQ only takes information from public LinkedIn profiles. By definition, any member of the public has the right to access this information. Most importantly, the appeals court also upheld a lower court ruling that prohibits LinkedIn from interfering with hiQ’s web scraping of its site." Surely I'm not reading this correctly. This would seem to suggest that websites are not legally allowed to prevent bots from crawli…
> Surely I'm not reading this correctly. This would seem to suggest that websites are not legally allowed to prevent bots from crawling their sites. Lots of sites have ToS preventing such things, are those legally void now? Are captchas on public pages illegal, even if you request the page 8000 times in a second?
This is just a preliminary injunction. This wasn't an actual ruling on the case. This just says that until there is a ruling they can't stop the scraping to make sure the company isn't put under while waiting for an actual ruling.
Re: Congrats! Web scraping is legal! (US precedent)
#120The toxicity towards web-scraping is really what makes me lose hope in the current web. People want their data to be public and all of the benefits that comes with public data but then they want to chose who gets to see it - it's a complete and utter paradox. This precedent doesn't really mean much but is definitely step in the right direction.
I want to be able to use LinkedIn to network with colleagues and people in my industry. If someone wants to scrape my profile to make a report on industry trends, I’m fine with it. What I don’t want is hiQ vacuuming up my data so they can snitch to my employer if they think I’m job hunting.
How is this a paradox? Tech — the web in particular — is supposed to be an equalizing force, but HiQ is clearly trying to give my employer more power over me. We are an industry that prides itself on solving difficult problems — how is our response here to just throw up our hands and say “it’s all or nothing”?