5 ms·
LinkedIn sues anonymous data scrapers
- ChuckMcM 10y agoThis should be interesting. In my opinion, this is the 21st century equivalent of people going into libraries and making photocopies of books and articles. But it has interesting precedents with Craigslist suits. I wonder if there will be a suit that tries to pierce the protections of user contributed content liability by using the fact that the company considers that content their proprietary property. Thus it is no longer UCC and they should be liable for any infringing or malicious use of that data.
- rcorin 10y agoYour analogy is better if the books or articles are written by the same users, like eg research papers and the editors (like Springer) dont allow the writers to even share their articles on the web.
- ommunist 10y agoSo, what if I will just scrape Google caches of LinkedIN profiles? I will never touch precious resumes at LinkedIN servers that way, and LinkedIN will never sue Google, since how else people will get to LinkedIN if not through Google? If only LinkedIN will not invest into some behavioural science to alter human habit of navigational search. Scrapebox does exactly that http://www.scrapebox.com/google-cache-extractor http://www.scrapebox.com/google-cache-extractor
- deedubaya 10y agoLinkedIn is holding your resume data for random, selling access to the recruiters you don't want to hear from because they have deep pockets. Imagine a world where you don't have to re-enter your education and work history for every job you apply to! Imagine not having to create a new resume every time you decide to switch jobs! Imagine just sharing a semi-private URL instead. This sounds like a market prime for disruption.
- abelarden 10y agoWe're doing exactly that in the UK. No recruiters, direct jobseekers-employer network using chosen location, structured data and faceted search.
- osullivj 10y agoURL please? I've tried untapt, and been unimpressed. I'm going to need a new contract at some point, so I'm open to a new route to market.
- vivekd 10y agoI remember reading that facebook had done something similar to a social media aggregation for scraping content from its website. This whole opening up of law suits for getting information that companies put out publicly for all to see seems like a dangerous new precedent.
- atemerev 10y agoIf it is visible, it is recordable. Scraping should fall under fair use policy: recording a TV program is OK, repackaging it and reselling to competing channel is not. Scraping for research and/or personal use should always be legal.
- chinathrow 10y agoScraping for $$$ is a huge market - and if one does not obey the robots.txt, I feel that a lawsuit as a last resort is appropriate. https://www.linkedin.com/robots.txt https://www.linkedin.com/robots.txt
- lazyjones 10y ago> Scraping should fall under fair use policy Even if the burden put on the scraped website is far from "fair"? At my last job we had half the server capacity used by scraping bots most of the time, despite blocking Tor (since it was used exclusively for scraping most of the time). Such use translates into real operating costs just for being scraped, depending on your way of monetizing with 0 (no ad views) or negative income from those "users" on top (sometimes it's the competition or agencies selling your data so people don't have to use your website).
- aj7 10y agoMaybe your business model has an intrinsic flaw. For instance on LinkedIn, how many of the 400M strivers do I really want to network with? Yet I (or my bot) can see them all.
- wodenokoto 10y agoThose are both stupid arguments. > Maybe your business model has an intrinsic flaw. Maybe business are free to decide on their business model and not forced to comply with anybody else hobby project. > how many of the 400M strivers do I really want to network with? Are you suggesting that linked should block your access to everything except what their ml algorithm decides will interest you?
- chatmasta 10y agoFunny how the headline is "LinkedIn sues" when it's obviously Microsoft behind it.
- staticautomatic 10y agoLinkedIn itself is almost certainly behind it and have done it before. See their suit against SimplyHired.
- us0r 10y agoThe company who built their business on scraping people's data is suing people for scraping data. I hope they fight this.
- us0r 10y agoThe company who built their business on scraping people's data is suing people for scraping data. I hope they fight this.