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Comment by bingidingi | Hacker News Reader

Yes, important to note that Microsoft is going after a competitor here; there are a bunch of data brokers that have been scraping LinkedIn for years and this is the case they're going after. I hope the Supreme Court can see through this BS and tell them to go pound sand.

(If Microsoft wanted to go after data brokers I'd be on board for that tho)

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LinkedIn pretty much tries or at least tried to stop ANYONE from scraping other than search engines, etc.

It was hiq that sued linkedin

After being threaten by LinkedIn: "LinkedIn told hiQ in 2017 to stop scraping LinkedIn's public profiles or face liability under the anti-hacking law."

I think it's fair to say LinkedIn is the instigator in this case.

That seems like it would have been a breathtakingly easy problem to solve using technical means instead of legal threats. They could've required logins to view profile information. They could have blacklisted any IP address exhibiting automated behavior.

That sort of 'solution' is just a game of technical whack-a-mole as one party finds a new way to scrape the data and the other finds a new way to stop them though. If you want to permanently stop scrapping you need a non-technical solution that stops someone even trying.

But thats exactly the issue here. If they find a way to limit the data such that they can split who is "authorized" and who is not, then they have found something that falls under the now new reading of cfaa.

It's not going to stop scrapers from entities outside of the jurisdiction of the US legal system, but it's going to end up icing companies in the US who do this.

But I think Microsoft/Linked In is going to have a very difficult time redefining authorized when the data is publicly available to anonymous access.

...after LinkedIn sent them a cease and desist and started causing problems with hiQs third-party contracts. They went after hiQs business with a dubious application of existing laws (CFAA).

It's not a dubious application. The CFAA says that it's illegal to access a computer system you don't have authorization to access, regardless of whether it's technically possible. It's no different than if a manager banned someone from a restaurant - if they return, even though the restaurant is easily accessible, they are nevertheless trespassing.

The recent ruling on the CFAA introduces some confusion in that if a user has authorization to access a system, they are no longer in violation of the CFAA even if they access it for disallowed reasons (ie if you're allowed in the krusty krab, you're not trespassing even if you only went there to steal the krabby patty secret formula). But that's irrelevant here because hiQ was explicitly told they did not have authorization to access (ie Plankton isn't allowed in the krusty krab regardless of what he intends to do there).

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