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

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

cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 293 posts

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

#241

Post by XCabbage »

olau wrote: post #215
Thorrez wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does there need to be a legitimate business purpose? What about freedom of speech? It's my website and I'll publish what I want to.

Eh, I think you got this backwards. If you really want to talk about this in terms of freedom of speech, LinkedIn is in the act of censoring? Edit: What I mean is that freedom of speech is not the same as freedom of censoring.

> What I mean is that freedom of speech is not the same as freedom of censoring.

This is at least not quite true of First Amendment law. The concept of "compelled speech" exists in US law, and is considered an unconstitutional violation of the First Amendment. Exactly what falls into that category (and whether the right of domain owners to censor user-provided content as they see fit is protected), I'm not sure, but freedom of speech in the US certainly does at least sometimes include the right not to speak.

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

#243

Post by nevi-me »

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…

Can we also be allowed to view people's profiles without being forced to sign in to LinkedIn? They lost my trust many years ago with their shady practises and 'dark patterns', so I don't want to share any of my data with them.

I however sometimes want to look up people. Or would this be a case of wanting to have my cake and eat it?

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

#244

Post by gondo »

nevi-me wrote: post #243
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…

Can we also be allowed to view people's profiles without being forced to sign in to LinkedIn? They lost my trust many years ago with their shady practises and 'dark patterns', so I don't want to share any of my data with them. I however sometimes want to look up people. Or would this be a case of wanting to have my cake and eat it?

There will be a 3rd party service for this once the scraping is legally allowed.

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

#245

Post by Shivetya »

Volokh take is an interesting read [1]

I am curious how quickly most pages get put behind authorization. With the wording of this ruling you could pretty much go snap up any blog side (say like medium) and more. I wonder what kind of services would come out of that, having the data in a format it can be more easier parsed/analyzed?

so every ecommerce site is fair game? I assume most are already being scraped but I cannot imagine having to be in an environment where many of your connections are not people

[1] https://reason.com/2019/09/09/scraping-a-public-website-does...

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

#246

Post by eru »

Xelbair wrote: post #223
akersten wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ugh, yeah, the more I think about this ruling, the less I like it. It's actually pretty insane to force a site to serve content. I think both parties are in the wrong here - HiQ for assuming they're entitled to receive a response from LinkedIn's webservers, and LinkedIn for abusing the CFAA to try to deny service rather than figure out a technical solution to their business problem. In my view: * The data is public,…

I would argue that under spirit of net neutrality you either serve your site to everyone equally(the public facing part) or to no one. Hosting costs money, servers cost money.. but maybe create a public facing API that is way cheaper and easier to use than scraping your website? I see that ruling in positive light that it might promote more open and structured access to the public facing data.

Why should you be forced to serve content to people who won't look at your ads?

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

#247

Post by emilfihlman »

dhimes wrote: post #73
emilfihlman wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Leaving the injunction in place is insane and a huge oversight. It amounts to making web pages carriers that cannot select who they serve. It should have said only that there is nothing judicially wrong with scraping but also not limited the rights of a service.

It's limited to public pages. They can still discriminate whom they serve, with logins or something, but they can't limit your ability to access their page in a way that you prefer.

Allthesame. If I as a web host want to fuck with people or just someone by randomly dropping connections, this says I can't (well, it says so for LinkedIn but it's results in the same being applied to others).

This is insane. It really should have just said that "it's legal to scrape" but it shouldn't have said "and you can't stop that".

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

#248

Post by mehrdadn »

Xelbair wrote: post #223
akersten wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ugh, yeah, the more I think about this ruling, the less I like it. It's actually pretty insane to force a site to serve content. I think both parties are in the wrong here - HiQ for assuming they're entitled to receive a response from LinkedIn's webservers, and LinkedIn for abusing the CFAA to try to deny service rather than figure out a technical solution to their business problem. In my view: * The data is public,…

I would argue that under spirit of net neutrality you either serve your site to everyone equally(the public facing part) or to no one. Hosting costs money, servers cost money.. but maybe create a public facing API that is way cheaper and easier to use than scraping your website? I see that ruling in positive light that it might promote more open and structured access to the public facing data.

> under spirit of net neutrality you either serve your site to everyone equally(the public facing part) or to no one

Huh? Net neutrality isn't about the server or client... it's about the network operator in between them.

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

#249

Post by C14L »

jjohansson wrote: post #181
dangero wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google only scrapes sites that allow it by their robots.txt file so I don’t think their policy is as hypocritical as you are making it sound.

They still scrape and index sites blocked by robots.txt, but they often don’t display those sites in their SERPs (but sometimes they still do)

Never seen it in any logs in 20 years.

Do you have a source for that claim?

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

#250

Post by ankurkwv »

Shivetya wrote: post #245

Volokh take is an interesting read [1] I am curious how quickly most pages get put behind authorization. With the wording of this ruling you could pretty much go snap up any blog side (say like medium) and more. I wonder what kind of services would come out of that, having the data in a format it can be more easier parsed/analyzed? so every ecommerce site is fair game? I assume most are already being scraped but I ca…

Hmm - I think a key in the ruling here was that LinkedIn maintains no copyright claim on these pages. Users on LinkedIn retain ownership of their profile data. Compare that to a blog and maybe copyright could come into play? Not a lawyer just thinking out loud...
Post reply on HN