LinkedIn sues anonymous data scrapers

LinkedIn sues anonymous data scrapers(techcrunch.com)

42 points by vivekpreddy 9 years ago | 18 comments

atemerev 9 years ago |

If it is visible, it is recordable. Scraping should fall under fair use policy: recording a TV program is OK, repackaging it and reselling to competing channel is not.

Scraping for research and/or personal use should always be legal.

lazyjones 9 years ago | |

> Scraping should fall under fair use policy

Even if the burden put on the scraped website is far from "fair"? At my last job we had half the server capacity used by scraping bots most of the time, despite blocking Tor (since it was used exclusively for scraping most of the time). Such use translates into real operating costs just for being scraped, depending on your way of monetizing with 0 (no ad views) or negative income from those "users" on top (sometimes it's the competition or agencies selling your data so people don't have to use your website).

atemerev 9 years ago | | |

It is your right, of course, to use whatever technical means necessary to make scraping harder.

And it is your right to sue whoever resells your data without licensing it.

But a legal pursuit just for scraping per se looks mean to me.

aj7 9 years ago | | |

Maybe your business model has an intrinsic flaw.

For instance on LinkedIn, how many of the 400M strivers do I really want to network with? Yet I (or my bot) can see them all.

chinathrow 9 years ago | |

Scraping for $$$ is a huge market - and if one does not obey the robots.txt, I feel that a lawsuit as a last resort is appropriate.

https://www.linkedin.com/robots.txt

deedubaya 9 years ago |

LinkedIn is holding your resume data for random, selling access to the recruiters you don't want to hear from because they have deep pockets.

Imagine a world where you don't have to re-enter your education and work history for every job you apply to! Imagine not having to create a new resume every time you decide to switch jobs! Imagine just sharing a semi-private URL instead.

This sounds like a market prime for disruption.

abelarden 9 years ago | |

We're doing exactly that in the UK. No recruiters, direct jobseekers-employer network using chosen location, structured data and faceted search.

osullivj 9 years ago | | |

URL please? I've tried untapt, and been unimpressed. I'm going to need a new contract at some point, so I'm open to a new route to market.

vivekd 9 years ago |

I remember reading that facebook had done something similar to a social media aggregation for scraping content from its website. This whole opening up of law suits for getting information that companies put out publicly for all to see seems like a dangerous new precedent.

ChuckMcM 9 years ago |

This should be interesting. In my opinion, this is the 21st century equivalent of people going into libraries and making photocopies of books and articles. But it has interesting precedents with Craigslist suits. I wonder if there will be a suit that tries to pierce the protections of user contributed content liability by using the fact that the company considers that content their proprietary property. Thus it is no longer UCC and they should be liable for any infringing or malicious use of that data.

rcorin 9 years ago | |

Your analogy is better if the books or articles are written by the same users, like eg research papers and the editors (like Springer) dont allow the writers to even share their articles on the web.

us0r 9 years ago |

The company who built their business on scraping people's data is suing people for scraping data. I hope they fight this.

chatmasta 9 years ago |

Funny how the headline is "LinkedIn sues" when it's obviously Microsoft behind it.

staticautomatic 9 years ago | |

LinkedIn itself is almost certainly behind it and have done it before. See their suit against SimplyHired.

ommunist 9 years ago |

So, what if I will just scrape Google caches of LinkedIN profiles? I will never touch precious resumes at LinkedIN servers that way, and LinkedIN will never sue Google, since how else people will get to LinkedIN if not through Google? If only LinkedIN will not invest into some behavioural science to alter human habit of navigational search.

Scrapebox does exactly that http://www.scrapebox.com/google-cache-extractor