IANAL, but IMO LinkedIn goofed by using the CFAA. eBay and BiddersEdge had a similar case, and eBay won, preventing scraping of its website using trespass: ht

IANAL, but IMO LinkedIn goofed by using the CFAA. eBay and BiddersEdge had a similar case, and eBay won, preventing scraping of its website using trespass: https://casetext.com/case/ebay-v-bidders-edge https://casetext.com/case/ebay-v-bidders-edge I can see both sides of this, and am not sure which is better. If a site is not allowed to block traffic, does that mean blocking a DDOS attack is illegal? What if the company doing the scraping is so aggressive about it that they are impacting performance? One fair way (to me) would be to figure out how many pages a typical user looked at per month, and if a company is scraping the site, they are limited to accessing it like one customer; they can't launch 100 threads to scarf down data as fast as possible. This probably wouldn't work for most scrapers' businesses, but it seems reasonable from the origin web site's POV. Another possibility would be to require web sites that accept and then publicize user submissions to give users a choice about whether they want to make their information public. If they do, the hosting site has to include the information in a publicly-accessible feed, like a daily compressed download. This seems reasonable to me, because the hosting site is getting all kinds of information for free from users. It's not like it would take a lot of effort to do a streaming JSON dump of the stuff that changed every day, and if necessary, they could throttle the download rate, but not so low that the data for a day couldn't be downloaded in a day. Ie, a competitor might be a day behind, but no more. Of course, the competitor would have to publish a feed too, allowing other people to lunch off of them just like they are lunching off other sites. With LinkedIn, all of the information they obtain and publish is submitted by users, so for LI to say they "own" this information makes no sense. At least with eBay, the current auction price is not not something the user submitted, assuming it has bids.