LinkedIn - Copyright and Use of Data - what's lawful and what's not

[Whitey]

LinkedIn Takes Legal Action To Stop Site Scrapers Stealing Profiles [webmasterworld.com...]

@graeme_p Its not clear that they have a copyright case - the copyright for information in the profiles is held by the person who wrote the profile. Nothing in the user agreement says otherwise.

They probably have a case for breach of the user agreement, where scrapers have signed up for fake profiles. AFAIK that is a criminal offence in the US (so is signing up for Facebook with a false name, in theory), but in other jurisdictions they may have to sue each person separately for actual damages. Difficult.

Here's some notes I picked up on the web with regards to use of data / web scraping :
damages and attorneys’ fees probably significantly reduces the cash value of this litigation to it.

Implications

1) It’s hard to scrape legally. Although this ruling is mostly good news for Eventbrite, it shows how hard it is to legally justify scraping. Scraping implicates lots of overlapping legal doctrines, and the scraper has to succeed on all of them.

2)

Outsourcing to Consultants

Websites that want to avoid legal liability for scraping might be tempted to outsource the activity to independent contractors. As this case illustrates, the court can collapse the legal distinctions between the hiring party and the independent contractor [blog.ericgoldman.org...]

and

3)

Cvent Didn’t Prepare the Case Well.

The case doesn’t mention several anti-scraping techniques that many websites frequently use, including robots.txt/robot exclusion headers, IP address blocks, rate limits (i.e., quantitative caps on the data an IP address can download within a specified time), a more prominent contract, timely copyright registrations and cease & desist letters. Perhaps Cvent did some of these things and the court didn’t mention them, or it may be some of the techniques would have been unavailable (such as IP address blocks or a C&D letter) because Cvent waited so long and perhaps didn’t discover the scrape when it was occurring. This leads to a corollary point: it’s easier to bust a scraper if you catch them in the act, so it can be hard to shut down a one-time scraper. [blog.ericgoldman.org...] .

Did we ever here on the results of success on any of LinkedIn's cases ?

Can anyone shed any light on the real legalities of LinkedIn's user agreement and whether it is truly binding ?

I mean if the data is put there by owners of the data, and is publically available, it is strictly copyrighted to the owners. Y/ N ?

And I'm not talking SPAM here. I'm talking legitimate business to business dataleads and contact.

Some interesting twists here. Thoughts?

[graeme_p]

Is the data publicly available or is it only available to logged in users? A lot of linked in data is only available to logged in users, who have agreed to the contracts. Given that fake profiles were created, it sounds as though the data is not publicly available.

THe creation of fake profiles is also different from just scraping.

A lot of this depends on jurisdiction. The Eventbrite case, apart from copyright, claimed breaches of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (which, I think, has broader scope than similar legislation in other countries), a similar law specific to Virginia, etc.