Date of Last Update: December 8, 2022 TL;DR This is a long article about a complicated issue involving more than 20 different laws. But you can read the bolded sections in just a few minutes, and you’ll get the gist of it. When I first published this guide, in the summer of 2020, I wrote … 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
In 2021, the two big stories in the world of web scraping and the law were the Supreme Court’s decision in Van Buren v. United States, and the Supreme Court’s decision to vacate the hiQ Labs opinion from the 9th Circuit in 2019 and remand it for further consideration light of Van Buren. As I … Read More
Web Scraping and Antitrust Law In 2019, in what was at the time the most important legal precedent in the United States with web scraping, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals wrote: We agree with the district court that giving companies like LinkedIn free rein to decide, on any basis, who can collect and use … Read More
Since the early 2000s, the most important federal law governing web scraping in the United States has been the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (“CFAA”). For host websites that wanted to stop scraping, the CFAA has been the go-to legal remedy to threaten web scrapers. For the first time since the law was enacted in … Read More
The first rule of the law of web scraping is this: Details matter. As I’ve written before, there are dozens of laws associated with web scraping. As such, no single “three-part test” can tell you whether what you’re doing is legal or not. The only way to properly assess that is to look into the … Read More
Web scraping has recently come under scrutiny from regulatory agencies that investigate securities laws. Increasingly, investment firms have been using web scraping as an alternative form of data collection. To bolster more traditional data sets like SEC filings and financial statements, investment firms have been going directly to websites and online resources to get information … Read More
