LinkedIn

The Ninth Circuit recently held that scraping a publicly available website doesn't violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the federal anti-hacking law.

And other federal courts will have the opportunity to weigh in on the CFAA question as well — though as the first major decision on the issue since Van Buren, we hope the hiQ opinion charts a course for those future judges to follow. (Though hiQ was a civil case, the CFAA is also a criminal statute, and courts are bound to interpret the law consistently in each context.) As we argued, letting website owners prohibit the press and public from noticing what they themselves have chosen to publish to the open internet would have a chilling effect on important, public-spirited information-gathering online. United States. And while Van Buren imposed important guard rails on the CFAA, including by highlighting the dangers of broad interpretations for routine “journalism activity” that the Reporters Committee had emphasized in a coalition brief, it didn’t squarely resolve whether (and if so when) the Act might limit scraping. The firm, in turn, sued LinkedIn for interfering with its business and won a preliminary injunction requiring LinkedIn to withdraw its cease-and-desist order. In a closely watched decision last month, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit delivered data journalists an important legal victory, holding that scraping a publicly available website doesn’t violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act — the federal anti-hacking law. In 2017, LinkedIn sent hiQ a cease-and-desist letter objecting that hiQ’s conduct violated the site’s terms of service — and thus the CFAA — while instituting automated tools designed to block the bots hiQ used to do it.