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Comment by mywittyname | Hacker News Reader

> But LinkedIn seems within their rights here.

Congress writes bad laws all the time. So LinkedIn might be within their rights, but that doesn't mean they should have those rights.

It's bad for innovation to allow for selective discrimination like this. LinkedIn is perfectly happy to allow Google, Yahoo, Bing, and many, many more companies to scrape their content and use it for personal profit. Giving them the option to sue an upstart for doing exactly the same thing as Google is unfair and oligopolistic.

Letting established tech giants get away with this will slowly erode American dominance in technology.

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The question is, how would you better define hacking? To make the letter of the law match the spirit? "Exceeding authorised access" is an early attempt that predates modern internet usage. You can't just say "anything the computer lets you do, is legal" because code exploits are just a computer following the (poorly-written) instructions in its code.

I'm not a lawyer, but it should a start with a clearly demonstrated attempt at prohibiting access to content. The words, "don't use this" are not enough. There needs to be active, ongoing safeguards to protect the data, i.e., authorization tokens, credentials, encryption keys, etc.

In the 80s, it was reasonable to assume that connecting to some port on a remote machine owned by another person or company could constitute unauthorized access. But today, billions of people connect to ports on remote machines thousands of times a day for completely legitimate reasons, so it's reasonable to assume that data that can be accessed by just asking nicely over the internet is considered intended for public consumption.

It seems permissive, but I think that's a crucial component. If some company makes accidentally makes their S3 buckets public, it's completely unfair to say that accessing that information is illegal, especially when they are serving up other information in public S3 buckets which they want people to access.

> Giving them the option to sue an upstart for doing exactly the same thing as Google is unfair and oligopolistic.

But it's not. LinkedIn's data is their entire business. They are within their rights to restrict access to it.

This is the classic ant and grasshopper story. If HiQ wants access to the type of data they are scraping from LinkedIn, they can build that data themselves.

They are within their right to require authorization to their content, yes, but they don't do that. They make it public and allow some companies to scrape that content and resell it for profit (like Google), but while restricting other companies from doing the same.

If they don't want their data to be public, then they shouldn't make it public. They could require authorization to view any content on the site and solve this problem instantly.

What leads you to believe that LinkedIn's data is public?

I believe mywittyname is specifically referring to the LinkedIn profile pages that are publicly visible without requiring a login and is not claiming that all LinkedIn's data is public. Thus, the question is why doesn't LinkedIn simply hide all profile data behind user authentication?

> But it's not. LinkedIn's data is their entire business.

"There has grown in the minds of certain groups in this country the idea that just because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with guaranteeing such a profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is supported by neither statute or common law. Neither corporations or individuals have the right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back."

> If HiQ wants access to the type of data they are scraping from LinkedIn, they can build that data themselves.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications,_Inc.,_v._R....

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