
U.S. judge says LinkedIn cannot block startup from public profile data - techrush
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-microsoft-linkedin-ruling-idUSKCN1AU2BV?il=0
======
iamleppert
I fully support this decision. If you're offering a service that is public,
with the intent to your users that such information will be available
publicly, you cannot then police what users of that data you consider to be
"public" because it serves your business interest.

LinkedIn, of course, wants to get all the benefit of the public Internet with
providing as little as they can. This, coming from someone who used to work at
LinkedIn.

These companies have built their fortunes on the public Internet and now that
they are successful they seek to not pay homage to the platform that give them
their success. It's very clearly anti-competitive, and bad for users. LinkedIn
should be forced to compete based upon the veracity and differentiation of
their service, not because they have their users' public data held hostage
from competitors.

~~~
anandsuresh
This is a tricky issue that has more to do with user psychology than
technology. While the data is public, most users do not understand the
persistence characteristics of data, especially in the presence of 3rd
parties.

In a world where there are no (persistent) copies made by third-parties, the
user still is in control of the visibility of their data by updating their
profile directly on LinkedIn to show/hide pieces as they see fit. With a 3rd-
party in the picture, updates to user-data may or may not be respected by the
3rd party, leading to poor user-experience.

Quoting the article, "HiQ Labs uses the LinkedIn data to build algorithms
capable of predicting employee behaviors, such as when they might quit."

Based on that one statement alone, as an employee, I would be uncomfortable
with the use of my data to supply my employer with my future plans before I
choose to disclose it myself. That choice is mine, and mine alone; not
something to be monetized simply because the option exists. And while I have
no control over the sharing of data, should something like this happen to me,
I'd be more inclined to stop using LinkedIn, which in-turn affects LinkedIn's
ability to do business.

~~~
redial
Then don't make your profile public.

You can't expect someone to forget you once had a bad haircut just because you
now got a really cool one.

~~~
ubernostrum
The problem is you're basically saying to re-train every person who uses the
internet to behave in a way completely different from what they're used to. If
you think you can do that, by all means try.

But don't be surprised when you find out that your expectations and their
expectations were different, and you're the one they blame, and they outnumber
you by a lot.

~~~
studentrob
> The problem is you're basically saying to re-train every person who uses the
> internet to behave in a way completely different from what they're used to.

When did we ever teach people that you can control where your data ends up on
the internet?

Aren't we trending towards teaching people to not even share data on "closed"
services like Facebook and Gmail precisely _because_ they are a single source
for a lot of data to be misused by the company, or hacked by a malicious
actor?

Regarding data that is accessible without "friending" someone or logging in as
the user themselves (e.g. Gmail), I hope people already realize that this data
can easily be re-used.

> But don't be surprised when you find out that your expectations and their
> expectations were different, and you're the one they blame, and they
> outnumber you by a lot.

If the majority of people think that they can share nude photos of themselves
on their own blog or twitter and that this won't be re-used elsewhere, well...
I must be living in a different reality, or I misunderstand your point.

~~~
azernik
We taught people that they could control where their data ends up _before_ the
internet, because that was an accurate model of reality. I think this is a
problem that we'll grow out of as more and more people grow up in the shadow
of omnipresent social media.

~~~
sowbug
Junk mail, telemarketing, revenge porn, and gossip predate the internet.
Different media, same lessons.

------
bigtones
This is just a preliminary injunction and the court has not even heard or
ruled on this case. They just allowed HiQ to access the data while they wait
for the scheduled court hearing to begin. The court may eventually rule very
differently once they have heard all the evidence presented and weighed up
existing applicable case law.

The judge who issued this injunction - Edward Chen, is also the judge
presiding over the Uber drivers as independent contractors class action case.

~~~
DannyBee
"This is just a preliminary injunction and the court has not even heard or
ruled on this case"

This is not quite right. One of the requirements to get a PI is a likelihood
of success on the merits ;)

~~~
SomeStupidPoint
The order discusses how less is required of the merits (need only raise
serious questions) if the consequences are dire (going out of business), then
discusses how they depend entirely on LinkedIn.

It's also possible that the judge is giving them affordance before killing
their business to prevent appeals.

~~~
DannyBee
FWIW: That is actually fairly rare. Usually the answer is "well, the creditors
can continue the lawsuit if they think it is valuable"

------
danschumann
Being a programmer not a lawyer, I like the idea of more rights for scrapers.
I don't want to see the internet partitioned away and owned by a few
companies, especially when that information is often called a "public
profile".

~~~
djsumdog
It gets into the incredibly murky water of how the web works. You're just
issuing a request and getting things back. Sometimes in a web browser,
sometimes not. But the content itself may still be copyright. You can't just
take it, even though for now, the publisher/server is allowing you to view it
for free.

But what if you only chose to view some of the content (e.g. block ads). What
if you apply your own styles to change the way that information is displayed?
You're just changing the way the browser represents that data. You're not
redistributing it as your own at this point. What if you store that data, but
don't republish it; just used it in some each algorithms?

There are a whole lot of interesting grey areas here, but many that already
have precedents that side more with the copyright holders.

~~~
swiley
Maybe the whole idea of copyright is flawed and harmful?

~~~
bitJericho
There's nothing wrong with copyrights; 14 year copyrights.

~~~
int_19h
Why 14, though?

I'm well aware of the historical precedent, but that number was rather
arbitrary even then - it was what a bunch of people agreed upon, based on
their ideas and experience, and given the environment. It's doubly arbitrary
today, considering how much the environment has changed. Is a 14-year
copyright on software reasonable, for example, or too long.

Rather than making it a hard cut-off point, it would be interesting to come up
with a scheme that attempts to capture the spirit of term limits.

Consider: why are copyright terms even a thing? Well, copyright is a monopoly
on a thing that is not naturally restricted; it does not exist in the absence
of society, and is therefore a privilege granted by that society. By itself,
copyright is meant to encourage creativity in the interest of public good, and
at the same time, to provide some means to derive profit from one's creative
expression. So there are two conflicting interests at play here - the desire
of the creator to be rewarded for the fruits of his labor, and the desire of
the society to enjoy growing, constantly enriched culture. The copyright term,
then, marks the point at which the latter trumps the former.

Instead, what we could do is capture the fact that the interests conflict. For
as long as you hold copyright, you're effectively denying society the ability
to freely enjoy the culture that you have enriched. Why, then, not tax the
copyright accordingly? You could consider it a kind of intellectual property
tax, but with a twist: the longer copyright is held, the more the interests of
society are infringed, and the larger the compensatory payment required to
maintain the copyright.

So we could start with a grace period of a couple of years that is completely
free, then it starts growing steadily. For some really popular work that makes
significant profits, the author could easily afford payments to maintain
copyright for a decade or two (or however long - that is something that can be
dialed arbitrarily). For things that are too obscure, payments would cease
shortly, and they would fall to public domain. There wouldn't be such a thing
as "abandonware" anymore.

What use to put the money to? Many possibilities there. Publicly sponsored
arts and art education is an obvious choice. Another interesting example would
be offering bulk sums of money to authors of culturally important works to
surrender their copyrights sooner, so that the public can enjoy them.

------
PatrickAuld
> “We will continue to fight to protect our members’ ability to control the
> information they make available on LinkedIn.”

LinkedIn has full control over this, it's their site. What they are fighting
for is the ability to choose who gets public access to various pieces of
information; which its member do not get control over.

~~~
sabujp
This is still very confusing, why didn't they completely block it from
scraping without a login?

~~~
gizmodo59
Because they won't get the traffic from search engines. Searching for a full
name very often leads to a LinkedIn page in top 10 results.

------
DanBlake
This seems very at-odds with previous rulings (specifically, relating to
craigslists many past dealings). Strikes me as being very unlikely to stand up
to appeal. Also, linkedin will likely modify their websites behavior (make you
click to agree before you view a profile) which would create a binding 'click
wrap' stopping companies from scraping them.

~~~
devrandomguy
That click wrap contract is kind of an interesting thing on it's own, for
those of us who only enable JS when absolutely necessary. If I never see the
agreement, and I am not specifically avoiding it, does it still apply to me?

~~~
CosmicShadow
There was a big ruling in Canada about this specifically around MLS, the big
real estate monopoly we have, so that if you go to their sites to search for
homes, like you'd see at Realtor.ca, you have to click through a clickwrapper
to access any data, and even if you automate past that, the fact that a human
would have to click it means that it's illegal to scrape since you are forced
as a human to agree to a TOS before you view.

~~~
devrandomguy
Ah yes, that. MLS compliance was a source of many tickets for me, in a
previous job, in Canada. The employer didn't even want me to waste time trying
to learn it all, just follow the compliance officer.

IIRC, this stuff varies quite a bit from region to region, even within a
single metropolitan area. Attempting to simultaneously comply with multiple
independently developed rulebooks was ... fun.

I can't wait for shipyard startups to disrupt the housing market. /s

------
charlesdm
"U.S. District Judge Edward Chen in San Francisco granted a preliminary
injunction request brought by hiQ Labs, and ordered LinkedIn to remove within
24 hours any technology preventing hiQ from accessing public profiles."

Interesting ruling

~~~
danschumann
I would hope there is a special consideration for any anti-ddos technology
they have. It would be hard to differentiate between a ddos'er and a scraper.
Rate limiting for ddos attacks might affect a scraper, then the question (
that linkedin is asking ), is how low can we limit them without looking like
we're blocking them. I have a feeling this isn't over!

~~~
0xCMP
I wonder if this isn't such a big deal since it's not like they're gonna
verify beyond "can they scrape now?"

As long as that is true then they will likely not run in to issues. Other
issues are not for blocking them and case can be made that it's a separate
issue. Defending against common internet attacks is an easy case to make to a
Judge. He can't be expect LinkedIn, in this case, to kill their service so
someone can scrape.

------
flyGuyOnTheSly
How does this affect Craigslist's Cease and Desist request to padmapper? [0]

[0] [http://blog.padmapper.com/2012/06/22/bye-bye-
craigslist/](http://blog.padmapper.com/2012/06/22/bye-bye-craigslist/)

------
comex
I don’t see anyone linking to the actual ruling, so I grabbed it from PACER.
Here it is:

[https://drop.qoid.us/linkedin-081417.pdf](https://drop.qoid.us/linkedin-081417.pdf)

------
razwall
From reading the ruling, the injunction was based on a finding that HiQ raised
serious questions about whether LinkedIn blocking HiQ's scrapers constituted a
violation of California's unfair competition law by violating the spirit of
federal antitrust law.

HiQ argued that LinkedIn has a monopoly on "the professional networking
market" and is unfairly exploiting that monopoly to gain an advantage in the
data analytics market. HiQ showed that LinkedIn might be developing an
analytics product that competes directly with their Skill Mapper product.

~~~
c3534l
Great. So in a business that makes money primarily by collecting and selling
user data, they're now required to give it away for free.

~~~
chalst
Correction: user-generated data. LI get the content from their users for free.

~~~
vntok
I dont understand how you came to think that. What about the cost of hosting
and serving the html forms (cpu and bandwidth), processing the content update
requests, storing the resulting data structures? What about the marketing
costs of making the brand known both by individuals and companies? The wages
associated to any of the operations i have just mentioned?

What definition of "free" are you using here?

~~~
fastier
I agree there seems to be a problems with means and investments: if I invest
to create a website with valuable data, and anyone can come and scrape my data
and start their own or a competing business, riding on top of my investment,
isn't that a disincentive to me?

------
thinbeige
Does the startup want to scrape the public profiles which you see when logged
out of LinkedIn? If yes, this profile data is of little value because it's
probably 5% of the real profile data (mainly just the summary) and often there
are no public available at all, many times these profiles are turned off for
public virw.

Or do they mean the 'public' profile which you see when logged in? If yes,
this would be a real case because this is awesome data I would like to scrape
and which you could build interesting business cases with.

------
drngdds
I'm confused. Is the judge saying that LinkedIn can't use the law to ban HiQ
from scraping their profiles or that they can't implement technology to block
scrapers? The former seems reasonable but the latter seems like an unjustified
restriction on how they operate their site.

~~~
ViViDboarder
Looks like technology... Which seems strange to me.

~~~
chalst
Less strange given that LI is a monopoly and the judge was arguing that LI was
unfairly restricting competition in HiQ's business space.

------
polote
So they want to forbid a startup to scrap the personal data of their users as
if Linkedin was the only company allowed to have access to this data.

I mean it is completely crazy, it is not LinkedIn data it is OUR data

~~~
lightbyte
Are you paying the hosting costs for LinkedIn's site and database? Their users
gave LinkedIn the data, it's now theirs.

~~~
JonathanAgosto
That's the equivalent of sending your resume to a company for a job opening
and the company saying, "since this resume is now on our control, we own the
information in it."

------
mtokunaga
This type of decision might also impact Yelp or any others in similar
businesses. Currently their API limits a top few reviews per business via
their API, and also prohibits "scraping" of data in other means.

I was going to do some experiments with larger datasets from businesses in a
region, but quickly found that's not possible.

~~~
devmunchies
And Google search results as well. Search results are publicly accessible but
if you try to crawl them, Google will block it.

If it becomes illegal to block crawlers, then Google is gonna get hammered
with bot traffic.

It will also mean that google won't have to be the front-end to search
results, and anyone can build on top of it, which could kill google ad revenue
because then you could create anonymous google searches.

~~~
tortasaur
Google already isn't the only frontend to their search. Look at Startpage, for
example.

------
codedokode
> U.S. District Judge Edward Chen in San Francisco granted a preliminary
> injunction request brought by hiQ Labs, and ordered LinkedIn to remove
> within 24 hours any technology preventing hiQ from accessing public
> profiles.

That is actually dangerous. Why some startup or some judge can tell me to whom
I can serve content and to whom I cannot?

------
walterbell
Is the reasoning in this case different from the Craigslist/3taps dispute?

------
opaque
Does anyone know how they do this scraping from a technical standpoint. The
articles allude to it being the same as data Google/Bing spiders, which can
clearly access more data that average internet IP for making their result
summaries. I had assumed big sites whitelisted specific crawler IP ranges or
User-Agents for the search giants. Do they somehow spoof this?

~~~
revelation
I don't think they do any such thing, if anything they are rotating IPs/user
agents to avoid being limited or blocked.

Google requires sites to send the crawler the same content as someone clicking
a link on a Google results page would see, so even if some sites get creative
covering it up with blurred boxes and similar dark patterns, the data is there
in the markup.

~~~
opaque
I haven't checked the markup, but if you try and hit a linkedin profile page
you just get forwarded to a login page. Perhaps if you don't follow the
forwarding?

Not sure how this complies with google's requirements, I suspect if you're big
enough you get a custom arrangement. However, that doesn't explain how hiQ are
getting the data.

------
paulie_a
I do find it odd that LinkedIn is fighting this considering they outright
steal your contact list and will spam your friends and family for years.

Recently I was setting up my new phone and thought about installing their app
and I thought to myself, why?

Eventually that thought came back to me when I was attempting to update my
profile and simply decided to delete it entirely.

------
brians
Well, good, right?

This is the same outcome most of us wanted between Swartz and JSTOR, and
perhaps with Malamud and PACER. No technical control can be in the right
place, but we can hope for a common understanding (maybe eventually law?) that
terms of service may demand or prohibit some things but not anything.

------
phkahler
I would prefer if my LinkedIn data was not public in the sense that one should
have to be logged in to see it, and ideally I should be able to see who viewed
it. If you have to be logged in to look, they can obviously limit the number
of profiles you can view to prevent scraping.

~~~
phkahler
Awesome! The day after this post I logged in to LinkedIn and they promoted a
(new?) feature where you can restrict who sees your profile. I turned it off
as much as possible for people who are not logged in. IMHO they should
probably make that the default if they don't want people scraping data.

------
PaulHoule
On one hand, LinkedIn is like Twitter, Craigslist and Delicious in that it has
sat on a treasure trove of data without helping users mobilize it. (All of the
premium services they offer are outright lame; if there was a _market_ for
premium services we might seem some good ones.)

On the other hand, privacy is an issue too. LinkedIn lets you download a
spreadsheet with the email addresses of all your connections, and if you have
a lot of connections you will regularly get e-mail messages from life coaches,
"managing directors", software development outsourcers, "SEO experts", and all
kind of BS artists.

------
wyldfire
This medium post [1] "The Birth And Death Of Privacy: 3,000 Years of History
Told Through 46 Images" gives an interesting and unintuitive context about
[personal] privacy, which is relevant in this debate about how to balance
personal privacy w/society's value in openness [and honesty].

[1] [https://medium.com/the-ferenstein-wire/the-birth-and-
death-o...](https://medium.com/the-ferenstein-wire/the-birth-and-death-of-
privacy-3-000-years-of-history-in-50-images-614c26059e)

------
brango
IANAL but I suspect the forthcoming GDPR will make this illegal for EU
customer data. It gives users greater control over their data, so I wouldn't
be surprised to find that it corresponds with this judgement, i.e. if a user
determines data to be publicly available, it must be made to be so.

Anyone know whether this is right?

And BTW in case you're not aware, if you hold data from any EU citizens you'll
be required to comply with the GDPR regardless of where you're located.

------
dizzydes
They needed to make it available within 24 hours - does that mean public
profiles are now scrapeable like any other page?

I tried a year ago and obviously it was impossible.

------
mpcovcd
Interesting. Does anyone know how this compares to the legal cases around
startups that would scrape Craigslist public data?

------
inthewoods
I'm curious how a ruling in this might potentially impact Google (or not).
Google is scraping those same profiles, but Linkedin clearly has no issue with
that because it drives traffic to their site. But Google is also making money
off of those profiles.

How can Linkedin argue that Google be allowed to scrap but other third party
cannot?

------
makecheck
When these decisions are made, I hope they come with technical guarantees on
ease of accessibility to data.

For instance, "buried in 6 layers of obfuscated XML" and "accessible in O(N^3)
time" would both be implementations that are not "blocking" the data but they
would still be extremely difficult to use.

------
mcbits
Microsoft/LinkedIn has so much more juicy and actually private data that
nobody can scrape, I don't understand why they would even make a scene and
tarnish their image over scraping. They know who _declines_ connection
requests from whom, when a CEO starts looking for a new job, and so on.

------
pjc50
The question of "data protection" hasn't been discussed enough here - it may
well be that Linkedin has no case against HiQ, but if HiQ is scraping people's
PII in the EU they are _required_ to have the permission of the data subjects.

How this interacts with Safe Harbour I have no idea.

------
joyneop
Nobody can require one to forget a knowledge, nor shall anyone be entitled to
do so. Collection and use of data should be legitimate. Storing data in HDD
and remembering things in brain are identical. Infringement of privacy,
reputation, or copyright is another issue.

------
c3534l
So does this ruling essentially outlaw robots.txt? If I only give access to
certain users, that's... illegal now? We're calling that a monopoly? How is
this reasonable to anyone else?

------
exabrial
Sorry a private company can do whatever it wants with its own property.
They're paying for the power and bandwidth...

This needs to be overturned unless LinkedIn is violating FRAND priciples.

------
fastier
I have a simple question: what is "public information" with respect to
websites? Anything I put on a privately owned website automatically becomes
"public"?

------
4684499
Can someone explain to me why didn't the robots.txt apply to HiQ's crawler? Is
crawling still legal while the robots.txt disallows your crawler?

~~~
drngdds
Yeah, it is. Robots.txt is just a way of politely asking people not to crawl
your site. It doesn't have anything to do with the law.

~~~
4684499
Thank you. I'm not sure if this analogy is correct but isn't that like a host
of a museum telling people do not take pictures yet someone did it anyway and
sold the pictures he took?

~~~
dawidloubser
I don't quite think so. There are specific laws governing the use of of, say,
photographic equipment within a private property.

If a web server, on other other hand, willingly serves content to both a
browser being operated by a human, as well as screen-scraping software, then
it shouldn't try to prescribe how the screen-scraper uses that information.

It would be the equivalent to, every time, asking somebody that works in the
museum if you can take a picture, and them saying "yes", and then wanting to
complain (or sue) afterwards.

~~~
icebraining
_If a web server, on other other hand, willingly serves content to both a
browser being operated by a human, as well as screen-scraping software, then
it shouldn 't try to prescribe how the screen-scraper uses that information._

That's not what was happening here. LinkedIn's server was blocking HiQ, and
HiQ _sued_ LinkedIn to prevent them from doing that.

------
flas9sd
HiQ signals your employer elevated likelihood of you jumping ship. Depending
on situation, this could favor a pay discussion or put you at a disadvantage.

------
coldcode
The question not really answered is, what is public profile data? Is it
visible to the general public, other linked in users, partially hidden?

------
J_cst
[English is not my primary language, so I'm probably wrong]

Shouldn't the title of this thread include a verb, like scraping/collecting?

------
heisenbit
Here in Germany there is copyright protection for databases as a compilation
separate from individual facts in the database.

------
fav_collector
Does this ruling include regular anti-scraping defenses that might stop HiQ,
but doesn't specifically target them?

------
sova
In a landmark decision that maintains you can take a picture of your community
bulletin board... le sigh

------
angryasian
out of curiosity, does anyone know if this company is scraping just whats
available if you're not logged in or are logging in and scraping. I believe
Linkedin shows different information based on if you're logged in or not ?

------
tejas1mehta
I wonder what would happen if some startup started using public Yelp reviews.

------
Throaway786
Will this mean Google search can now also be scraped.

~~~
dragonwriter
This is a preliminary injunction, which is a tool to prevent irreparable harm
to a party before a case is resolved on its merits.

It shouldn't be taken as a strong indicator of what will be found legal in
this case, much less a different hypothetical one.

------
MechEStudent
Linked IN could nuke this problem with a decent EULA.

------
pavlakoos
Shouldn't LinkedIn simply introduce captcha?

~~~
icebraining
For accessing the public page of profiles?

~~~
pavlakoos
Well, not just for accessing, but for scraping, meaning accessing a huge
number of those pages in an automated way.

~~~
icebraining
How would that work for Google?

If you think they shouldn't show it for Google, then that's what HiQ is suing
them over :)

------
binarysaurus
How does the tinder debacle fit into this?

------
ahmeni
The most surprising aspect of this is having anyone manage to consider any of
the data valuable at the tire-fire of a social network LinkedIn.

------
SomeStupidPoint
Does anyone know where to view this ruling?

I'm curious how it passes free-association muster: you're not allowed to
discriminate on particular tasks, but there's no reason you can't discriminate
based on eg, behavior or user-agent or IP address.

It seems very strange to me that the judge would order MS to associate against
their will prior to hearing the arguments.

~~~
dwynings
[http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/2017_0814_h...](http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/2017_0814_hiq_order.pdf)

~~~
EpicDavi
After skimming the document for a bit, hiQ's argument looks really flaky.
Especially grasping at straws like "Free Speech". They argue that LinkedIn is
like a public mall and denying them access to the mall is denying them "Free
Speech"? I don't see how this can be the case if they had no intent to "speak"
at all in this place. Their data collection via scraping seems more like
people-watching in the mall, if you go along with their analogy.

~~~
razwall
Indeed, and the court rejected that part of HiQ's argument.

"In light of the potentially sweeping implications discussed above and the
lack of any more direct authority, the Court cannot conclude that hiQ has at
this juncture raised 'serious questions' that LinkedIn's conduct violates its
constitutional rights under the California Constitution."

------
feelin_googley
Here's a copy of the pleading:
[http://www.almcms.com/contrib/content/uploads/sites/292/2017...](http://www.almcms.com/contrib/content/uploads/sites/292/2017/06/HiQvLinkedIn.pdf)

"In a press statement, LinkedIn says: "Our members control the information
that they make available to others on LinkedIn and they trust us to honor that
control. HiQ is taking member data, without their knowledge, and using it for
purposes our members haven't agreed to.""

I use a text-only browser. As old-timers know the first web browser back in
the early 1990's was also text-only. Text-only atill works great, believe it
or not. Especially for reading information like one finds on LinkedIn.

I cannot acess LinkedIn after the Microsoft acquisition.

Microsoft says members control access. Do they check a box that says

    
    
       [ ] Disallow blind users from viewing my profile as text-only.
    

or

    
    
       [ ] Disallow access by HiQ.
    

The Microsoft statement says HiQ is "taking member data" _without their
knowledge_. This sounds as though members are unaware "they" had a decision to
make whether HiQ can access their profile, or whether a noncommercial user can
access their profile with, e.g, links, w3m, lynx or the W3 Consortium's line
mode browser. Indeed I doubt members either know or care about such access.

And if Microsoft partners with a company such as HiQ, then do members get a
veto on use of their profile?

I think members probably have no right to even be informed that such
partnerships exist!

Did LinkedIn members have any say in whether the company could sell itself,
and control over access to their profiles, to Microsoft?

Web users today generally have little ability to control how companies share
their data (e.g. with advertisers and partner companies).

We saw this type of argument in the 3Taps case. Where we were asked to believe
Craigslist users were the ones enforcing their copyright or that they
designated Craigslist to act as their agent. Anyone who uses the web knows
this is utter BS.

"U.S. District Judge Edward M. Chen will preside over Thursday's hearing. At
an earlier proceeding, on June 29, he appeared torn by the issues presented.
On the one hand, he expressed skepticism that the federal Computer Fraud and
Abuse Act-a criminal statute-really barred the mere use of bots to harvest
public information. "You can get it manually if you hired a hundred million
people to do it," he observed, "but if you want to do it quickly and
automatedly, you can't do it? That is a crime?"

~~~
duskwuff
The vast majority of blind users do not use text-based browsers. This is a
common misconception! They use normal web browsers controlled by accessibility
tools like JAWS or VoiceOver.

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jlgaddis
RTFA before commenting, folks. Questions and misunderstandings in this thread
that are easily fixed if you just RTFA.

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tryingagainbro
Fixed the headline: U.S. judge says LinkedIn cannot block startup from public
profile data; the judge will personally pay for the gazillion servers and man
hours needed now that scrappers cannot be blocked.

