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A Comprehensive Legal Guide to Web Scraping in the US

Date of Last Update: July 20, 2023 When I first published this guide, in the summer of 2020, I wrote that the recent trend had been toward greater permissiveness with web scraping.  That sentence isn’t as true today as the day when I first wrote it. Recent policy trends have wavered. The few jurisdictions where … Read More

Six Web-Scraping Legal Trends for Q1 2024

2024 is going to be a massive year for web-scraping legal decisions. There will be substantive decisions in all the major generative AI cases. Big-name scraper Bright Data is in legal battles with Twitter and Facebook. Ryanair and Booking.com are locked in a legal struggle. And so on. With all that, I suspect this is … Read More

Arbitration for Thee but Not for Me

It is common knowledge among lawyers that online platforms have broad leeway to enforce arbitration agreements in their online ToS. But one wrinkle that is perhaps not as well known is that many companies selectively draft their online contracts to compel arbitration when they prefer it, while still allowing them to avail themselves of traditional … Read More

Can an LLC use a SAFE?

The short answer is: That’s not what they were designed for. The longer answer is that you shouldn’t use a standard SAFE note to raise capital with an LLC, because it specifically contemplates a type of investment that LLCs cannot do. Namely, a priced, preferred stock round with a venture-capital firm. Most venture capital firms … 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