LinkedIn obtained a permanent injunction on Dec. 6 in its six-year-old lawsuit against data scraping company hiQ Labs, which LinkedIn quickly cheered as a “final, decisive victory” that established an “important legal precedent.” While the stipulated injunction does prevent hiQ Labs from scraping LinkedIn’s data, the outcome of the lawsuit notably does not affect previous rulings by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in the case against LinkedIn and in favor of companies that wish to scrape (i.e., automatically collect) publicly available data.

In particular, neither the outcome in this case nor a similar recent victory by Meta Platforms against scraper BrandTotal impacts the principle that platforms may not wield the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA, 18 U.S.C. §1030) to prohibit scraping publicly available data from their platforms.

This content has been archived. It is available through our partners, LexisNexis® and Bloomberg Law.

To view this content, please continue to their sites.

Not a Lexis Subscriber?
Subscribe Now

Not a Bloomberg Law Subscriber?
Subscribe Now

Why am I seeing this?

LexisNexis® and Bloomberg Law are third party online distributors of the broad collection of current and archived versions of ALM's legal news publications. LexisNexis® and Bloomberg Law customers are able to access and use ALM's content, including content from the National Law Journal, The American Lawyer, Legaltech News, The New York Law Journal, and Corporate Counsel, as well as other sources of legal information.

For questions call 1-877-256-2472 or contact us at [email protected]