BY Jason Tashea
Earlier this month, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals at San Francisco took a stand for an open internet. A three-judge panel found that automated searching of a public website, also called web scraping, is not a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the country’s main anti-hacking law.
At issue was whether or not hiQ Labs, a data analytics company, could continue to scrape publicly available data from LinkedIn, which is owned by Microsoft, even after the resumé website sent a cease-and-desist letter.
LinkedIn argued that, after receiving the cease-and-desist letter, hiQ Labs’s scraping was “unauthorized access”—the internet’s version of trespass—under the CFAA. HiQ Labs thought that, since the data it collected was public, its actions were legal. The appellate court sided with hiQ Labs.
