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 … Read More
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 … Read More
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 … Read More
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 … 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
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
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