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Web Scraping Law: A 2025 State‑by‑State & Circuit‑Split Guide
When it comes to web-scraping legal issues, people want easy answers. They want to know if web scraping is legal or it isn’t. Unfortunately, the truth is rarely as simple as that. The reason is two-fold: First, context always matters in web scraping. The nuances of when, where, what, and how you’re scraping matter in assessing legality. That requires a case-by-case analysis. And second, there is considerable variation in different jurisdictions in terms of how the laws governing web scraping are interpreted. Most people don’t think about state-by-state legal differences when they think about web-scraping laws. And very few people…
EU Data Act Compliance Guide, A 2025 Primer
TL;DR The EU Data Act becomes an enforceable law on September 12, 2025. It requires sharing of data from all connected products or services. It applies to any US business that has data in its possession from connected products or services that is above a certain size threshold. Most US companies are not at all prepared for this. And many to whom it applies likely haven’t even heard of it. This article is designed to let you know the basics in time to get ready. Introduction The EU Data Act is a law that is almost entirely without precedent in…
AI and Evidence in Legal Processes
Plenty of people have written about whether AI is going to replace lawyers. Leaving that question aside, not enough people have focused on the way widespread use of AI is going be used as evidence in legal proceedings. Throughout modern times, when people had legal questions, they asked lawyers. And if they formed an attorney-client relationship with those lawyers, those conversations would be protected from being used against them in the legal process. Now, the most powerful form of pseudo-intelligence in history has arisen over the course of just a few years, and people are already starting to use this…
Legal Negotiation and Poker
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…
An Introduction to Legal Risks with Process Automation
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…
How to Comply with the GDPR and CCPA as a Web Scraper
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…
Is Web Scraping Legal? A 2025 Breakdown of What You Need to Know
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…