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

A Comprehensive Guide to the Law of Online Contracts

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

The SEC, Web Scraping, and Material Non-Public Information

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

California Court: Facebook Can Enforce No Scraping Prohibition in Terms of Service in Password-Protected Section of Site

Facebook aggressively monitors web scraping on its platforms. And they aren’t shy about sending out cease and desist letters when they believe someone is violating their terms of service. After the Ninth Circuit’s decision in hiQ Labs, Inc. v. LinkedIn Corp. in 2019, however, there might have been some question whether a court (and, in … Read More

Cross-Post: 11th Circuit Reverses Legal Momentum for Permissiveness in Web Scraping

I recently wrote a post at Professor Eric Goldman’s Law and Technology Blog about an important web scraping case out of Florida from earlier this year. If you’re in the web-scraping business, you’ll definitely want to check that out here. This blog post is for informational purposes only. The views expressed in this post may … Read More