4 ms·

My counterpoint: companies shouldn't get to have their cake and eat it too, as in offering public content, but then preventing competitors from using that publi

by dannyw 5y ago

My counterpoint: companies shouldn't get to have their cake and eat it too, as in offering public content, but then preventing competitors from using that public content. To use another example, what if Google+ was a success, and Google blocks every other competing search engine from indexing even public posts on Google+? Is that a good outcome? There are already copyright protections to stop Shutterstock from ripping, say, all of Getty Image's photos. What we are talking about here is information so banal, so unoriginal, so uncreative, that copyright doesn't even apply.

gwoplock 5y ago
> My counterpoint: companies shouldn't get to have their cake and eat it too, as in offering public content, but then preventing competitors from using that public content. I agree this case is taking an anti-competitive action and spinning it into a pro-privacy case. However, what's the line? Personally I believe if you apply the rules equally to competitors and non-competitors alike you can restrict programmatic access to public data. Since LinkedIn isn't doing that, HiQ shouldn't be restricted. In any case I think this is a poor use of the CFAA.
jjk166 5y ago
Let's say you own a restaurant. It's a public place, people are welcome to come on in and take a seat. But there's a guy across the street who likes to come in, take pictures of everyone eating there, piss off your customers, and then leave without even ordering anything. After he's done this several times, you tell him he's not allowed in your restaurant anymore. He comes back anyways. Is he trespassing? This isn't a matter of stealing information. HiQ is more than welcome to acquire the information by other means. If hiQ scraped the same information from an archive site hosted by someone else it would be fine. But they've been explicitly told they're not authorized to access linkedin, and the CFAA is unambiguous that if you don't have authorization to access a system it's illegal to access it anyways, which is very much in keeping with how we'd treat access to a brick and mortar public business.

by dannyw 5y ago

gwoplock 5y ago

> My counterpoint: companies shouldn't get to have their cake and eat it too, as in offering public content, but then preventing competitors from using that public content. I agree this case is taking an anti-competitive action and spinning it into a pro-privacy case. However, what's the line? Personally I believe if you apply the rules equally to competitors and non-competitors alike you can restrict programmatic access to public data. Since LinkedIn isn't doing that, HiQ shouldn't be restricted. In any case I think this is a poor use of the CFAA.

jjk166 5y ago

Let's say you own a restaurant. It's a public place, people are welcome to come on in and take a seat. But there's a guy across the street who likes to come in, take pictures of everyone eating there, piss off your customers, and then leave without even ordering anything. After he's done this several times, you tell him he's not allowed in your restaurant anymore. He comes back anyways. Is he trespassing? This isn't a matter of stealing information. HiQ is more than welcome to acquire the information by other means. If hiQ scraped the same information from an archive site hosted by someone else it would be fine. But they've been explicitly told they're not authorized to access linkedin, and the CFAA is unambiguous that if you don't have authorization to access a system it's illegal to access it anyways, which is very much in keeping with how we'd treat access to a brick and mortar public business.