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LinkedIn loses appeal over access to user profiles

reuters.com

71–80 of 168 posts

Re: LinkedIn loses appeal over access to user profiles

#71
>>that required LinkedIn, a Microsoft Corp unit with more than 645 million members, to give hiQ Labs Inc access to publicly available member profiles.

Not sure this is a win for the web. Sure it's user submitted but the users agreed that Linked in owns that after they submit.

Re: LinkedIn loses appeal over access to user profiles

#72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would they have to make it available to startups in an easily accessible manner?

IMDB was originally crowdsourced, wasn't it?

It started as lists and shell scripts to query them in the newsgroup rec.arts.movies.

Re: LinkedIn loses appeal over access to user profiles

#73

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.

To me this is conceptually the same problem as DRM - with your position similar to those trying to build DRM systems.

One can’t both hand over data freely to a service (in this case Linkedin) and also subsequently prevent all sharing of that data. Or to put it another way, you can’t both put your information on a public billboard hoping a recruiter sees it to offer you a job AND keep it strangers private from people you hope won’t misuse it.

Re: LinkedIn loses appeal over access to user profiles

#74
I do not like a hide and seek game with who viewed your profile functionality: upgrade to a paid subscription to see who viewed, upgrade to another tier to hide that you looked at someone.

It looks like the lack of imagination or business prowess to come up with more advanced, valuable, and less annoying ways for monetisation. If only they could make it easier to connect people with matching mutual interests, more flexible than plain traditional job board and the database of CVs.

Re: LinkedIn loses appeal over access to user profiles

#75

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…

> Not sure "isn't LinkedIn property" is accurate here.

It is very accurate. Users retain the copyright on their works in so far as their works are able to be copyrighted. Anything that is a "mere fact", and can't be copyrighted, is also not LinkedIn's property.

From LinkedIn's terms of service[1]:

> you are only granting LinkedIn and our affiliates the following non-exclusive license:

> A worldwide, transferable and sublicensable right to use, copy, modify, distribute, publish, and process, information and content that you provide through our Services and the services of others, without any further consent, notice and/or compensation to you or others.

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1. https://www.linkedin.com/legal/user-agreement#rights

Re: LinkedIn loses appeal over access to user profiles

#76
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not quite like that. The first company cannot prevent scraping by individuals or another company of information that it already shows to everyone. Which, to me, is a good thing. My 2c.

Eh. I want my picture and name uploaded to LinkedIn, since it's a professional network and people use it to find me for good reasons. It may seem dumb, however not having a LinkedIn with a good picture can genuinely hurt your career. I do NOT want my picture run through facial recognition software, or my name/email sold to marketers who will add it to a drip campaign.

Exactly. I don't like or "enjoy" LinkedIn but I do find it useful professionally.

Now it sounds like this ruling implies that by creating a profile on one platform, I have to accept that every company that comes along can include me in their corpus.

Maybe I should be able to set a pass-through GDPR flag on my profile such that third parties (subject to that regulation) will have to exclude me from their datasets.

Re: LinkedIn loses appeal over access to user profiles

#77
post #62

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, e…

IANAL

> 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)?

I don't think so.

> Under the Copyright Act, a compilation is defined as a "collection and assembling of preexisting materials or of data that are selected in such a way that the resulting work as a whole constitutes an original work of authorship." 17. U.S.C. § 101 [1]

The thing is, LinkedIn is not authoring the compilation. The individual users are.

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1. https://www.bitlaw.com/copyright/database.html

Re: LinkedIn loses appeal over access to user profiles

#78

I do not like a hide and seek game with who viewed your profile functionality: upgrade to a paid subscription to see who viewed, upgrade to another tier to hide that you looked at someone. It looks like the lack of imagination or business prowess to come up with more advanced, valuable, and less annoying ways for monetisation. If only they could make it easier to connect people with matching mutual interests, more fl…

You don’t have to pay to hide that you viewed someone’s profile. Maybe if you want to see who viewed yours, but also keep your browsing private — but it seems more reasonable to charge for that sort of functionality.
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