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No. The US Supreme Court has ruled that a website cannot use TOS to prevent other companies from scraping publicly available data, even if they're doing so to
by spaced-out 3y ago
No. The US Supreme Court has ruled that a website cannot use TOS to prevent other companies from scraping publicly available data, even if they're doing so to directly harm the people who posted that data (citation below).
Basically, a company called HiQ was scraping public LinkedIn data to sell a service where they would inform companies if their employees were looking for a job on LinkedIn -- because LinkedIn will hide info from your employer for obvious reasons. LinkedIn sent cease-and-desist, then later sued by lost.
https://www.fbm.com/publications/what-recent-rulings-in-hiq-v-linkedin-and-other-cases-say-about-the-legality-of-data-scraping/ https://www.fbm.com/publications/what-recent-rulings-in-hiq-...
- tpxl 3y agoThe ruling states you can't use the CFAA to prevent people from scraping. It says nothing of copyright, and indeed you can't just ignore licenses when scraping, otherwise every public repository on GitHub would be a free-for-all.