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

9 Web Scraping Legal Questions for 2022

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

What the Supreme Court Opinion in Van Buren Means for Web Scraping

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

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