Podcast: Web Scraping Tools Ruling with Polly Tran

Is it lawful for companies to scrape web data from websites that may be viewed by the general public? In the sixth episode of our In That Case podcast, Shook Associate Polly Tran explores a U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit Court ruling in a lawsuit stemming from a company scraping information shared by LinkedIn’s users on their publicly available pages. 

In hiQ Labs v. LinkedIn Corp., the Ninth Circuit considered an effort by hiQ Labs to block LinkedIn from invoking the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act against it for collecting and selling data it scraped from LinkedIn users’ public profiles.

“This decision may foreshadow how courts treat data collection by AI tools that use vast data sets and methods such as web scraping to generate content,” Tran said.

The case is hiQ Labs v. LinkedIn Corp., 938 F.3d 985 (9th Cir. 2019).

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