[Air-L] Web scraping is legal, US appeals court reaffirms

[Peter Timusk]

I believe in subjects of research giving informed consent.

On Tue., Apr. 19, 2022, 5:34 p.m. Peter Timusk, <peterotimusk at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Other countries courts may have different results. Canada rules
> differently on some IP topics like the onco mouse for example.
>
> On Tue, Apr 19, 2022 at 4:39 PM Joly MacFie via Air-L <
> air-l at listserv.aoir.org> wrote:
>
>> https://techcrunch.com/2022/04/18/web-scraping-legal-court/
>>
>> Web scraping is legal, US appeals court reaffirms
>> Zack Whittaker at zackwhittaker / 12:16 PM PDT•April 18, 2022
>>
>> Good news for archivists, academics, researchers and journalists: Scraping
>> publicly accessible data is legal, according to a U.S. appeals court
>> ruling.
>>
>> The landmark ruling by the U.S. Ninth Circuit of Appeals is the latest in
>> a
>> long-running legal battle brought by LinkedIn aimed at stopping a rival
>> company from web scraping personal information from users’ public
>> profiles.
>> The case reached the U.S. Supreme Court last year but was sent back to the
>> Ninth Circuit for the original appeals court to re-review the case.
>>
>> In its second ruling on Monday, the Ninth Circuit reaffirmed its original
>> decision and found that scraping data that is publicly accessible on the
>> internet is not a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, or CFAA,
>> which governs what constitutes computer hacking under U.S. law.
>>
>> The Ninth Circuit’s decision is a major win for archivists, academics,
>> researchers and journalists who use tools to mass collect, or scrape,
>> information that is publicly accessible on the internet. Without a ruling
>> in place, long-running projects to archive websites no longer online and
>> using publicly accessible data for academic and research studies have been
>> left in legal limbo.
>>
>> But there have been egregious cases of web scraping that have sparked
>> privacy and security concerns. Facial recognition startup Clearview AI
>> claims to have scraped billions of social media profile photos, prompting
>> several tech giants to file lawsuits against the startup. Several
>> companies, including Facebook, Instagram, Parler, Venmo and Clubhouse have
>> all had users’ data scraped over the years.
>>
>> The case before the Ninth Circuit was originally brought by LinkedIn
>> against Hiq Labs, a company that uses public data to analyze employee
>> attrition. LinkedIn said Hiq’s mass web scraping of LinkedIn user profiles
>> was against its terms of service, amounted to hacking and was therefore a
>> violation of the CFAA. LinkedIn first lost the case against Hiq in 2019
>> after the Ninth Circuit found that the CFAA does not bar anyone from
>> scraping data that’s publicly accessible.
>>
>> On its second pass of the case, the Ninth Circuit said it relied on a
>> Supreme Court decision last June, during which the U.S. top court took its
>> first look at the decades-old CFAA. In its ruling, the Supreme Court
>> narrowed what constitutes a violation of the CFAA as those who gain
>> unauthorized access to a computer system — rather than a broader
>> interpretation of exceeding existing authorization, which the court argued
>> could have attached criminal penalties to “a breathtaking amount of
>> commonplace computer activity.” Using a “gate-up, gate-down” analogy, the
>> Supreme Court said that when a computer or website’s gates are up — and
>> therefore information is publicly accessible — no authorization is
>> required.
>>
>> The Ninth Circuit, in referencing the Supreme Court’s “gate-up, gate-down”
>> analogy, ruled that “the concept of ‘without authorization’ does not apply
>> to public websites.”
>>
>> “We’re disappointed in the court’s decision. This is a preliminary ruling
>> and the case is far from over,” said LinkedIn spokesperson Greg Snapper in
>> a statement. “We will continue to fight to protect our members’ ability to
>> control the information they make available on LinkedIn. When your data is
>> taken without permission and used in ways you haven’t agreed to, that’s
>> not
>> okay. On LinkedIn, our members trust us with their information, which is
>> why we prohibit unauthorized scraping on our platform.
>>
>> --
>> --------------------------------------
>> Joly MacFie  +12185659365
>> --------------------------------------
>> -
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>
>