This case does not make web scraping legal or illegal, it just sets a precedent that Computer Frauds and Abuse Act (CFAA 1986) cannot directly be applied in web

This case does not make web scraping legal or illegal, it just sets a precedent that Computer Frauds and Abuse Act (CFAA 1986) cannot directly be applied in web scraping of public data for fair use. Web scraping can be legal with caveats which is, as long as you are just scraping a public information and do not re-sale it for profit without significant transformation and value addition i.e. a fair use doctrine is applied. If you use bots to login using a username and password and than scrap the information, it's still wrong and infringement, as action of login binds you to an implicit contract with this website and by logging in you accept those terms. The ruling on HiQ vs LinkedIn is quite nuanced and if you are crawling and than repackaging that information and selling it somehow then there is a highly likely chance the precedent in this case won't apply. Technical barriers like rate limiting and captcha are legitimate way to guard against not just web crawlers but denial of service (DoS) attacks, so it's about how it's been put forward by lawyer. So in general website can still continue to block like google, facebook, amazon and all the big sites are doing it. It's not illegal, I found a better deep understanding of this case based on explanation from a EFF. [1] [2] [1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/09/victory-ruling-hiq-v-linkedin-protects-scraping-public-data https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/09/victory-ruling-hiq-v-l... [2] https://www.eff.org/document/hiq-v-linkedin-ninth-circuit-decision https://www.eff.org/document/hiq-v-linkedin-ninth-circuit-de...