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Reiterating its prior common-sense opinion, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in hiQ v. LinkedIn that the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act likely does not bar scraping data from a public website against the wishes of the website owner. Last year, after the Supreme Court decided its first CFAA case, Van Buren v. United States, it vacated the Ninth Circuit’s original ruling in hiQ and sent it back to court of appeals for reconsideration. According to the Ninth Circuit, Van Buren only “reinforces” the court’s earlier determination that access to a public website cannot be “without authorization” under the meaning of the CFAA, as EFF argued in our most recent amicus brief. The hiQ decision is good news for all those who collect, aggregate, and index publicly available information, as well as the work of journalists, researchers, and watchdog organizations, who use automated tools to find security flaws, news stories and investigate discrimination in public websites.
Why Has LinkedIn Gotten So Many Tries at Playing CFAA Gatekeeper on the Open Web?
The long-running dispute in hiQ concerns LinkedIn’s attempts to stop hiQ from scraping public information from LinkedIn user profiles as part of hiQ’s data analytics services. LinkedIn tried to block hiQ’s access and threatened to sue for violation of the CFAA, on the theory that hiQ’s access violated the website’s terms of service and LinkedIn’s explicit wishes. But hiQ sued first and obtained a preliminary injunction to preserve its access.
The key question for the Ninth Circuit on appeal was whether access to a public website can ever be “without authorization” under the CFAA. According to an earlier Ninth Circuit precedent, Facebook v. Power, merely violating a website’s terms of service is not enough to be a violation of the CFAA,
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Read the original article: Scraping Public Websites (Still) Isn’t a Crime, Court of Appeals Declares