TheNextWeb.com reported that a U.S. court has ruled that scraping data from a public website without permission is not illegal. This is going to prove to be a very interesting case on appeal as it could set a very interesting precedent.
From the article:
An appeals court situated in California, US, today said it’s not illegal to scrape data from public websites without any prior approval. Web scraping refers to the process of collecting large troves of data with the use of web crawlers – scripts designed to lift information from web pages.
The ruling comes after a legal dispute between LinkedIn and data analytics firm HiQ. LinkedIn sent a cease-and-desist letter to HiQ, demanding it to stop scraping the site. In response, the data analytics company counter-sued in hopes of blocking LinkedIn from interfering.
And this will help the likes of Domain Tools et al re collection of Whois data !!
Oh! That is right… we are govern by organise crime. Free for all.. If you want rights… join the mafia!
Copyrights are still in effect, right?
Is the data copyrighted or the formated data?
Sounds like anyone scraping can take someone’s data. Not good.
That’s not actually what the court ruled.
Unfortunately, reporters tend not to understand the procedural context of court decisions, and will often make mistakes like the one referenced in the OP.
The court did not rule that data scraping was legal.
This appeals court ruled that it was not an abuse of the trial court’s discretion to deny a preliminary injunction against the data scraper while the case goes forward. Now, that might not bode well for LinkedIn when the case is finally adjudicated, and if LinkedIn appeals a final ruling against it, but it is kind of irritating when decisions on preliminary rulings are reported as if they were final rulings.
I’ll unpack that:
When you file a suit against someone to get them to stop doing something, it might take a while to get a decision to stop them from doing whatever it is. If your case is really strong, and if what they are doing is really harmful to you, then you can, even before you get to trial, discovery, or any other phase of the litigation file a motion saying, “Hey, court, my case is really strong, and what they are doing is really hurting me. Can you at least order them to stop it while the lawsuit is proceeding?”
That request is called a motion for a “preliminary injunction” (PI). It is “preliminary” because the court really hasn’t had a chance to dig into all of the facts and arguments. When you ask for a PI, it’s not the same as a final ruling on the case. It is based on a relatively quick look at the facts. Among other things, your case has to be really obviously strong, you have to have a strong likelihood of winning it, the harm has to be significant, and a handful of other factors.
The trial court has a good deal of discretion in whether or not to grant a preliminary injunction.
What that means is that if you do not like the court’s ruling on your PI motion, then if you take it to an appeals court, as LinkedIn did here, then the appeals court is (a) not going to be very impressed with you, and (b) is going to apply a standard of decision along the lines of whether the trial court was smoking crack, or whether the decision was reasonably within the wide latitude that a trial court has to grant, or not to grant, your PI.
For example, if you scroll to the end of the court’s opinion, you’ll notice that one of the judges wrote separately to agree with the others, but to add an extra spanking for LinkedIn appealing the PI decision in the first place. It’s kind of annoying since it was LinkedIn’s PI motion that was denied in the first place, and then they go whining to the appeals court that they didn’t get what they wanted. Oh well, that’s what trials are for, but at the end of the day, LinkedIn did not manage to show that the case was a no-brainer in their favor or that the defendant was doing them a whole lot of harm that LinkedIn couldn’t otherwise address. Additionally, the PI motion was addressed to a narrow range of potential theories against the defendant, and didn’t deal with a variety of other theories on which the defendant ultimately be required to shut down.
The way that you express facts is protectable as your property. The facts themselves are not. If you look up the time of sunrise tomorrow on some publicly-accessible website, and it says 6:30 AM, that website cannot prevent you from repeating the fact that, yup, the sun is going to come up at 6:30 AM tomorrow.
What do people use LinkedIn for? Do they use it (a) as a platform to publish selected information about themselves, or do they use it (b) to supply LinkedIn with proprietary data for LinkedIn to monetize? I think if you asked LinkedIn users, you’d get a whole lot more people saying (a) than (b).
Amazing that the author of the article does not know that it is simply a preliminary decision , prior to actually looking at the contents of the full case itself.
It can be confusing.
A decision like this can certainly give you a good idea which way the wind will eventually blow, but it may not be the last word. The point is that the decision standard here is “was the trial court crazy” and not necessarily “was the trial court right”.