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LinkedIn loses appeal over access to user profiles

reuters.com

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Re: LinkedIn loses appeal over access to user profiles

#61

Post by pharrington »

jakeogh wrote: post #12
echelon wrote: post #2

This is fantastic. I would like to see wider legislation allowing scraping of IMDB, Genius, Reddit, Facebook, and Google made legal. These services receive free input from users. The data should remain free. Edit (sort of off topic): There's still value in the building and providing services at scale, but this lowers the barrier to cross the moat for small players. The first step is data liberation. Then we can work…

It's already legal. Adding law adds restrictions.

You're not wrong. In the general case though, adding law can mandate that a certain already occurring activity must be done.

Re: LinkedIn loses appeal over access to user profiles

#62

Post by lucb1e »

pixelmonkey wrote: post #15

The summary here is that LinkedIn tried to argue that it could prevent scraping of public LinkedIn profile data under their ToS, but the courts have ruled that if data is public and provided by users, it can be scraped/crawled, that is, it isn’t LinkedIn property. This is generally a positive outcome for people/companies turning web text and HTML into structured data, e.g. tools like Puppeteer and Scrapy can be used…

This is about the copyright on the items that people post, i.e. creative works, right? But what if LinkedIn collects facts (where you work, your age, etc.), wouldn't that be covered by sui generis property right (better known as database copyright)?

Does this judgement say anything about that, i.e. whether it matters that users contributed the facts in their collection (so I'm not talking about posts, descriptions, etc.) rather than that they collected it themselves and therefore get a form of property right?

Edit: wait, database copyright is not a thing in the USA. Of course they wouldn't say anything about that.

Re: LinkedIn loses appeal over access to user profiles

#63

Post by paulgb »

GarrisonPrime wrote: post #56
perl4ever wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"it can be scraped/crawled, that is, it isn’t LinkedIn property" I thought it was pretty established that putting something on a website didn't eliminate your copyright. Has that changed now? To me, it seems like common sense would be that if you make a public website, you are implicitly permitting some copies, but surely it's not all or nothing?

Perhaps it depends on intent. Clearly, the creators of the content, and those who posted the content, did so for the sole intention of making it public and usable outside the LinkedIn system. Their posting of it on LinkedIn is incidental; what site is used or who owns it is largely irrelevant to them, whereas such things clearly do matter to any company or person creating and posting their own unique content to their…

At one point, to fight scraping, Craigslist changed their terms so that users assigned them copyright of listings rather than just a license. It didn't work well for them, but it's an interesting approach.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/04/craigslist-owns-what-y...

Re: LinkedIn loses appeal over access to user profiles

#64

Post by nitrogen »

jakeogh wrote: post #49
Barrin92 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how did you get that out of my post? My argument is that people should make laws that ends the business model of companies like hiQ, and that LinkedIn, although obviously acting in self-interest, is legitimately defending its platform here against third parties who are trying to use public information in privacy-violating ways.

By letting ToS have the force of law...

What is a contract if not something backed by the force of law?

There's a big difference between "I want a public profile so colleagues and employers can contact me about opportunities" vs "I want a public profile so some third party I have no knowledge of can enable others to discriminate against me".

Re: LinkedIn loses appeal over access to user profiles

#65

Post by giancarlostoro »

Gene_Parmesan wrote: post #47
tus88 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can decide to not use linked in, and use a service that does not make profiles public.

Even better, the decision here is only concerning profiles of people who have elected to make that profile public. It's very simple to make your LinkedIn profile private.

The concern I had is that the court forces LinkedIn profiles public regardless of user settings. Courts sometimes go a little further. I'm sure LinkedIn will do their best to not allow private profiles to be crawled.

Re: LinkedIn loses appeal over access to user profiles

#66

Post by genidoi »

lr4444lr wrote: post #46

What cracks me up about this is how these massive companies go to such lengths to call themselves mere platforms in order to avoid liability for content, and then when someone actually takes the content in this case they cry, "Foul! That's ours !" Can't have it both ways.

Linkedin tried to argue that if they put data behind a login wall, then it no longer falls under the wide umbrella of "public data" and so it's "theirs". Previous cases already established that if a crawler can see the data without any session cookies then its okay. This ruling extended that to any data that can reasonably be accessed by any member of the public.

There will probably be more cases like this as the upper bound of what "public data" means; At what point does publicly aggregated data stop being public data? And do attempts that companies make to prevent that data from being captured (ip limiting, captchas, login walls) count as immoral/illegal, since they are restricting the public from accessing a public good?

Re: LinkedIn loses appeal over access to user profiles

#67

Post by lucb1e »

Nextgrid wrote: post #6
perspective1 wrote: post #4

I'm torn. On the one hand, scraping helps break down walled gardens. On the other, we're talking about personal details being used in novel ways that no LinkedIn user probably understands. I doubt any LinkedIn user writes their profile expecting HiQ to scrape it, assign a "flight risk" score and alert your bosses.

The users agreed to publish their details publicly on LinkedIn. It’s normal that anyone can access those details and use them however they like.

There are privacy settings though, and recruiters used to be able to see more than other non-contacts. I'm not sure if that is still the case, but so what is being shared is not always exactly obvious to the user.

Re: LinkedIn loses appeal over access to user profiles

#68

Post by sjg007 »

perl4ever wrote: post #43
thomascgalvin wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An earlier ruling actually ordered LinkedIn to stop attempting to block the scraping using technological measures, too.

Has robots.txt been outlawed now? In what jurisdiction exactly?

I don't believe that robots.txt has ever had the backing of law.

Re: LinkedIn loses appeal over access to user profiles

#70

Post by jjeaff »

eagsalazar2 wrote: post #59
pixelmonkey wrote: post #15

The summary here is that LinkedIn tried to argue that it could prevent scraping of public LinkedIn profile data under their ToS, but the courts have ruled that if data is public and provided by users, it can be scraped/crawled, that is, it isn’t LinkedIn property. This is generally a positive outcome for people/companies turning web text and HTML into structured data, e.g. tools like Puppeteer and Scrapy can be used…

Not sure "isn't LinkedIn property" is accurate here. They still retain ownership and control of redistribution just like any other IP. This is more of a philosophical question about whether "viewing" itself is a violation of their ownership rights and really about the definitions of "viewing" and "public" in the context of the internet. Seems like they've simply determined that viewing any freely accessible URL is "p…

If I enter my employment record and my profile pic, birthdate, etc, I don't think that is the ip of linkedin. Maybe the way they display it or if they are transforming it in some way it could be considered ip. But if someone scrapes all that user entered data and then displays it somewhere else in a different format, I can't imagine LinkedIn being able to claim their ip has been infringed.
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