Date of Last Update: January 12, 2022 TL;DR This is a long article about a complicated issue involving more than a dozen different laws. But you can read the bolded sections in just a few minutes and you’ll get the gist of it. The good news for web scrapers is that the overall trend has … Read More
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
On April 18th, the Ninth Circuit issued its opinion in hiQ Labs, Inc. v. LinkedIn. Corp. on remand from the Supreme Court. My quick take: This is perhaps the most important case in the history of web-scraping litigation. It is about limiting the scope of a federal criminal statute with civil applications in a civil … Read More
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
Web Scraping and Antitrust Law In 2019, in what was at the time the most important legal precedent in the United States with web scraping, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals wrote: We agree with the district court that giving companies like LinkedIn free rein to decide, on any basis, who can collect and use … Read More
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 first rule of the law of web scraping is this: Details matter. As I’ve written before, there are dozens of laws associated with web scraping. As such, no single “three-part test” can tell you whether what you’re doing is legal or not. The only way to properly assess that is to look into the … Read More
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
Note: The numbers relating to Delaware’s tax rates below are accurate at the time this article was drafted. Delaware may change its charges; you should confirm those numbers at the time of filing. Delaware’s annual tax on corporations, which it calls a franchise tax, is due March 1st each year. There are two methods of … Read More
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
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.
