Variations in Legal Interpretations of the DMCA

The second “circuit split” we’ll look into in this series is disagreements among federal circuits with how to apply the DMCA. 17 U.S.C. § 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) has a series of provisions aimed at targeting parties that engage in “anti-circumvention” of protected works. This law was designed in the early days … Read More

Web Scraping and Copyright Preemption of State-Law Claims

This post explains why §301 copyright preemption splits matter and previews how each circuit treats contract‑based scraping claims. I’ve written over 3000 words on this subject before, but this is probably the most understudied and under-litigated issue in the world of web scraping. Preemption means that federal law overrides state law when the two are … Read More

Six Web-Scraping Legal Trends for Q1 2024

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

Arbitration for Thee but Not for Me

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

9 Web Scraping Legal Questions for 2022

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