61–70 of 85 posts
video: https://youtu.be/tvLdJujOp8k
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do you do when you build an entire business on top of LinkedIn, then they decide to completely revoke your access? We need DE-centralization, so no-one in the world has this type of power over anyone.
Totally agree. About 10 years ago I was the first hire of a startup built partially on top of LinkedIn. A Monday we got a cease and desist letter. We had to immeditely stop using their API and had to start crawling the data instead. That almost killed us.
Interesting that they've made a business out of this. I've always maintained to my colleagues that when I see a bunch of LinkedIn activity from them, I can tell that they're putting themselves on the job market.
The Supreme Court curtailed the broad scope of the CFAA recently in the van Buren case. I personally agree with that decision (and also find it funny as it continues the long trend of Clarence Thomas being on the wrong side of history). While van Buren's actions were obviously problematic he was an authorized user of the computer system. The issue is the vagueness of the CFAA has been a prosecutor's wet dream and a p…
My counterpoint: companies shouldn't get to have their cake and eat it too, as in offering public content, but then preventing competitors from using that public content. To use another example, what if Google+ was a success, and Google blocks every other competing search engine from indexing even public posts on Google+? Is that a good outcome? There are already copyright protections to stop Shutterstock from rippin…
I agree this case is taking an anti-competitive action and spinning it into a pro-privacy case. However, what's the line? Personally I believe if you apply the rules equally to competitors and non-competitors alike you can restrict programmatic access to public data. Since LinkedIn isn't doing that, HiQ shouldn't be restricted.
In any case I think this is a poor use of the CFAA.
The Supreme Court curtailed the broad scope of the CFAA recently in the van Buren case. I personally agree with that decision (and also find it funny as it continues the long trend of Clarence Thomas being on the wrong side of history). While van Buren's actions were obviously problematic he was an authorized user of the computer system. The issue is the vagueness of the CFAA has been a prosecutor's wet dream and a p…
They didn't actually take it up, but sent it back to the 9th for a re-hearing in light of Van Buren v. US. But that ruling seems to make LinkedIn's case even weaker, I too am somewhat confused about what's going on, what options were available to the supreme court and what signal this one sends.
Anyone have a better article?
2 questions I asked myself after reading this: 1) Do I side with LinkedIn or HiQ? 2) What case law precedent do I think we ought to set? I’m personally conflicted on which way to lean. I see pros and cons to both - this is an interesting case.
Scraping for non-profit purposes feels fine. Scraping for commercial purposes feels dirty. I don't know if there's a way for the law to square that circle.
Isn't indexing for search what HiQ is doing too?
Note that LinkedIn could make this whole issue moot by putting their data behind a login tomorrow. The 9th circuit decision pretty clearly stated that. The only reason the data is public is for marketing purposes, to sign up more users.
Is that too much to ask?
The Supreme Court curtailed the broad scope of the CFAA recently in the van Buren case. I personally agree with that decision (and also find it funny as it continues the long trend of Clarence Thomas being on the wrong side of history). While van Buren's actions were obviously problematic he was an authorized user of the computer system. The issue is the vagueness of the CFAA has been a prosecutor's wet dream and a p…
> by taking up this case SCOTUS is potentially going in the other direction. They didn't actually take it up, but sent it back to the 9th for a re-hearing in light of Van Buren v. US. But that ruling seems to make LinkedIn's case even weaker, I too am somewhat confused about what's going on, what options were available to the supreme court and what signal this one sends. Anyone have a better article?
Honestly I missed this subtlety but it does make it even clearer: SCOTUS is asking the Appeals Court to revisit if bots constitute "unauthorized" use (under CFAA).
Van Buren decided that if an authorized user used a computer system for what were effectively policy violations and didn't bypass restrictions on that use then it's not "unauthorized" in the CFAA sense.
Consider a phone book (ie the white pages). It has names of individuals who haven't opted out in alphabetic order. This makes it incredibly easy to find a mapping of name -> phone number (in O(log n) technically). You could do a lookup of phone number -> name but its inefficient (O(n)) and the volume of names is so large that it's not feasible for a person to do it.
There are good reasons to prevent this reverse mapping, privacy among them.
Now imagine that phone book is online. Obviously someone could scrape this data and built that reverse index. So the website provider does things like rate-limit your queries, occasionally CAPTCHA you (FWIW) and so on.
If the LinkedIn decision stands, such impediments may be blocked by courts. That's probably not a good outcome.
Additionally, doing that lookup yourself is infeasible but totally feasible with a bunch of automated lookalikes (ie bots).
So I would say SCOTUS is hinting that the Appeals Court ruling is too broad and some limits on website access can apply.
That's my guess anyway.