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I was recently in a high-stakes negotiation with a skilled negotiator. At the outset of the negotiation, he performed a few small gestures that made the parties feel comfortable with one another, and then he began his negotiation with a request: He asked us “to assume positive intent.” I smiled and nodded. It’s a nice thought. Sort of. But in this context, it was ridiculous. The parties had a long history of turmoil. They parties were in related and adjacent industries and were always going to have to deal with each other in some capacity. But their past interactions were…

Automation is everywhere. From robotic process automation (RPA) to AI-driven decision-making, businesses are integrating automation into their decision-making processes like never before. However, with these advancements come critical legal considerations that companies must address or face the wrath regulators—or worse, plaintiffs’ lawyers! One general principle that businesses should understand is that automation will usually be held to a higher standard than humans. Because humans driving cars is the way it’s always been done, and self-driving cars are new and scary, self-driving cars need to be ten times safer than people before regulators will let them on the road. And even…

Probably around half of all internet traffic comes from bots or scraping. Despite that fact, there isn’t much guidance out there for how to comply with privacy laws when scraping. Notably, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) impose strict compliance requirements on companies collecting, storing, and processing user data. Non-compliance can result in severe penalties, including hefty fines and legal action. As an attorney who has advised over 100 clients on web scraping and data access issues, privacy isn’t usually the first risk to mitigate. The first risk to mitigate as a scraper…

It was five years ago when I first published the comprehensive guide to legal issues with web scraping. It was just after the seminal hiQ Labs v. LinkedIn case where a few folks wrote articles proclaiming that “web scraping is legal.” And I thought the world needed a more nuanced analysis of the legal issues associated with web scraping. Initially, that article served as a good source of leads and conversations. But the law of web scraping evolved so fast that maintaining the article became a source of constant stress. And if I left an old version out there for…

In August 2023, I wrote a blog post that was unusual for me. Rather than cover a case or a particular legal issue, I wrote a long rant about hypocrisy in the legal world of web scraping. It became perhaps the most popular thing I have ever written. To this day, it is one of the highest-traffic blog posts in the 20-year history of Professor Eric Goldman’s Technology & Marketing Blog. It was featured on Tyler Cowan’s Marginal Revolution. It shot straight to the top of Hacker News. I suspect it’s the most popular piece of writing ever on web…

2024 is going to be a massive year for web-scraping legal decisions. There will be substantive decisions in all the major generative AI cases. Big-name scraper Bright Data is in legal battles with Twitter and Facebook. Ryanair and Booking.com are locked in a legal struggle. And so on. With all that, I suspect this is going to be the most important year ever for the law of web scraping. Here are some trends I’m looking for in early 2024. The Pendulum Shifts? Not too long ago, I was writing about how bleak things were looking for web scrapers in the…