Date of Last Update: July 20, 2023 When I first published this guide, in the summer of 2020, I wrote that the recent trend had been toward greater permissiveness with web scraping. That sentence isn’t as true today as the day when I first wrote it. Recent policy trends have wavered. The few jurisdictions where … Read More
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 … Read More
It is common knowledge among lawyers that online platforms have broad leeway to enforce arbitration agreements in their online ToS. But one wrinkle that is perhaps not as well known is that many companies selectively draft their online contracts to compel arbitration when they prefer it, while still allowing them to avail themselves of traditional … Read More
Online contracts are a farce. Everyone knows they’re a farce. But every year, more areas of the law are consumed by the law of online contracts. — In 2011, Marc Andreesen wrote a landmark blog post called, “Why software is eating the world.” It was so prescient that the phrase is now embedded in the … Read More
The short answer is: That’s not what they were designed for. The longer answer is that you shouldn’t use a standard SAFE note to raise capital with an LLC, because it specifically contemplates a type of investment that LLCs cannot do. Namely, a priced, preferred stock round with a venture-capital firm. Most venture capital firms … Read More
One of the more common refrains I hear from clients is the phrase “I want to limit my liability to the maximum extent possible.” And I think most lawyers are thrilled when they hear this, because it means the client is risk averse and wants legal services. But the expression always gives me pause. I … Read More
Time to catch up on cross referencing some of my more recent writing and blog posts on other sites. Last fall, I wrote two big pieces on Eric Goldman’s Law and Technology Blog. The first breaks down the key summary judgment ruling in the hiQ Labs, Inc. v. LinkedIn Corp. case. The second breaks down … Read More
One of the main reasons I first became interested in the law of web scraping was because of how hard it was to find reliable information about it. Years ago, I had a client with a big web-scraping project, and they asked me to research whether what they were planning on doing was legal or … Read More
Every time I drive my car, I follow the same algorithm for how fast I drive. If I’m driving on a highway or an open road, I drive between 6 and 9 miles over the speed limit. If I’m driving in a neighborhood or near a school, I drive 3 to 4 miles over the … Read More
Date of Last Update: April 25, 2022 TL;DR This is a long article (nearly 13,000 words!) about a complicated subject. It provides substantial amounts of historical context and legal analysis. You might not care about any of that. But you can read the bolded sections and the infographics, and you’ll get gist of it. One … Read More
On April 18th, the Ninth Circuit issued its opinion in hiQ Labs, Inc. v. LinkedIn. Corp. on remand from the Supreme Court. My quick take: This is perhaps the most important case in the history of web-scraping litigation. It is about limiting the scope of a federal criminal statute with civil applications in a civil … Read More
