Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Congrats! Web scraping is legal! (US precedent)

parsers.me

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 409 posts

Re: Congrats! Web scraping is legal! (US precedent)

#291

Post by jjeaff »

kazagistar wrote: post #277
lovehashbrowns wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your analogy doesn't hold. Your backyard is private property. The data that LinkedIn publishes is intended for the public. That's why Google can index the pages and give you results from LinkedIn.

Can someone taking down a open source project, like the leftpad debacle, be sued for tort?

Doubtful. If linkedin had completely taken down their site, or put it all behind a login account, them this case would not have turned out the same.

Maybe if leftpad somehow tried to block only some users from using their publically available plugin.

Re: Congrats! Web scraping is legal! (US precedent)

#292

Post by cirno »

kabacha wrote: post #11

The 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

Can you really not imagine a world where a person accidentally or in poor judgment uploads something private to their own site (their real name, home address, credit card#, or any piece of highly damaging information that could cost them their careers) and wishes for it to be removed? (but can't because many of these scraping sites never respond to takedown requests)

People make mistakes and post things they shouldn't. A mistake from someone many years in the past that they've made amends for shouldn't haunt someone for the rest of their lives.

But it does when we decide that every single line of text ever uttered online must be preserved and easily accessible by anyone for all eternity.

Blocking scrapers is an arms-race escalation because these sites refuse to remove content, and it's used as a tool for character assassination by bad actors. It's a proactive defense.

Re: Congrats! Web scraping is legal! (US precedent)

#293

Post by [deleted] »

briandear wrote: post #261
kerkeslager wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> I don't believe organizations have rights, period So a group of people, joining together in a common cause, don’t have rights as members of that group? You are contradicting yourself. Organizations are simply groups of people with a shared cause. To deny rights to the organization, you necessarily have to deny personal rights. Example: John and Sam form an organization for comic book collecting. They have a secret…

[deleted]

Re: Congrats! Web scraping is legal! (US precedent)

#295

Post by andrewmutz »

beerandt wrote: post #241
andrewmutz wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but if the user does not have a service account (as is the case for HiQ, it doesn't seem they were using accounts for it), then your ToS does not apply, since you've technically not entered a binding legal contract with them. Are you sure about this? I am not a lawyer, but I believe that the Terms of Service applies to all users, not just those that explicitly set up a user account. I have interpreted the LinkedIn…

Terms of Service is a form of contractual agreement, which requires there be an offer and subsequent agreement by the parties. I don't think criminal law was ever part of this.

From the article, the LinkedIn decision was that scraping data does not violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Violating that act was considered to be criminal activity. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act)

Re: Congrats! Web scraping is legal! (US precedent)

#296

Post by gregmac »

0x445442 wrote: post #269
briandear wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who pays for that API and the bandwidth? What’s in it for the data provider? On LinkedIn, viewing the data now shows ads or at least prompts the viewer to join the network. With scrapping and free API access, how exactly does LinkedIn benefit for their work of hosting the data?

My guess is hiQ (and others) would happily pay for an API over the data they're scraping right now.

Unless the costs exceed their current operational costs. Don't forget the time spent redeveloping on the new API, which includes validating everything is there, testing and cleaning up and removing the old (working) code.

Re: Congrats! Web scraping is legal! (US precedent)

#297

Post by protanopia »

powrtoch wrote: post #38

"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…

> If LinkedIn wanted to force users to sign in to view profile info

Do they not already do this? Every link I've ever seen for LinkedIn has redirected me to sign up page rather than showing me the content.

Re: Congrats! Web scraping is legal! (US precedent)

#298

Post by munificent »

0x445442 wrote: post #269
briandear wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who pays for that API and the bandwidth? What’s in it for the data provider? On LinkedIn, viewing the data now shows ads or at least prompts the viewer to join the network. With scrapping and free API access, how exactly does LinkedIn benefit for their work of hosting the data?

My guess is hiQ (and others) would happily pay for an API over the data they're scraping right now.

Why buy the cow when you get the milk for free?

Re: Congrats! Web scraping is legal! (US precedent)

#299

Post by jackfoxy »

> The CFAA is adopted to prevent deliberate intrusion on someone else’s computer — in particular, computer hacking

hacking is commonly used to mean different things, and we imply from the context what the author really meant. Do any lawyers know if computer hacking has a legal definition, or if this decision will lead to a specific legal definition of the term?

Post reply on HN