After a yearslong lead-up, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) published its final “open banking” rule in October. The rule effectuates the section of the Consumer Financial Protection Act, which charged…
In an ongoing dispute commenced in 2016, the Eleventh Circuit for the second time in the lifetime of the litigation considered trade secret misappropriation and related copyright claims in a scraping case between direct competitors.
The case involved plaintiff Compulife Software, Inc. (“Plaintiff” or “Compulife”) – in the business of…
On May 9, 2024, a California district court dismissed, with leave to amend, the complaint brought by social media platform X Corp. (formerly Twitter) against data provider Bright Data Ltd. (“Bright Data”) over Bright Data’s alleged scraping of publicly available data from X for use in data products sold…
Late last year, Chegg Inc. (“Chegg”), an online learning platform, obtained a preliminary injunction based on allegations that the various operators of the Homeworkify website (“Defendants”) – which allows users to view Chegg’s paywalled solutions without creating an account – violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). (Chegg …
On January 23, 2024, a California district court released its opinion in a closely-watched scraping dispute between the social media platform Meta and data provider Bright Data Ltd. (“Bright Data”) over Bright Data’s alleged scraping of publicly-available data from Facebook and Instagram for use in data products sold to third…
In a recent post, we recounted the myriad of issues raised by recently-filed data scraping suits involving job listings, company reviews and employment data. Soon after, another interesting scraping suit was filed, this time by a major airline against an award travel search site that aggregates fare and award travel data. Air Canada alleges that Defendant Localhost LLC (“Localhost” or “Defendant”), operator of the Seats.aero website, unlawfully bypassed technical measures and violated Air Canada’s website terms when it scraped “vast amounts” of flight data without permission and purportedly caused slowdowns to Air Canada’s site and other problems. (Air Canada v. Localhost LLC, No. 23-01177 (D. Del. Filed Oct. 19, 2023)).[1]
The complaint alleges that Localhost harvested data from Air Canada’s site and systems to populate the seats.aero site, which claims to be “the fastest search engine for award travel.”
It also alleged that in addition to scraping the Air Canada website, Localhost engaged in “API scraping” by impersonating authorized requests to Air Canada’s application programming interface.
UPDATE: On February 5, 2024, the California district court granted the defendant Aspen Technology Labs, Inc.’s motion to dismiss Jobiak LLC’s web scraping complaint for lack of personal jurisdiction, with leave to amend. The court found that Jobiak had not adequately alleged that its copyright and tort-related claims arose out of the defendant’s forum-related activities and that there were no allegations that Jobiak’s database or website was hosted on servers in the California forum. On March 8, 2024, the court dismissed the action with prejudice, as Jobiak did not submit an amended complaint within the time allowed by the court.
In recent years there has been a great demand for information about job listings, company reviews and employment data. Recruiters, consultants, analysts and employment-related service providers, amongst others, are aggressively scraping job-posting sites to extract that type of information. Recall, for example, the long-running, landmark hiQ scraping litigation over the scraping of public LinkedIn data.
The two most recent disputes regarding scraping of employment and job-related data were brought by Jobiak LLC (“Jobiak”), an AI-based recruitment platform. Jobiak filed two nearly-identical scraping suits in California district court alleging that competitors unlawfully scraped its database and copied its optimized job listings without authorization. (Jobiak LLC v. Botmakers LLC, No. 23-08604 (C.D. Cal. Filed Oct. 12, 2023); Jobiak LLC v. Aspen Technology Labs, Inc., No. 23-08728 (C.D. Cal. Filed Oct. 17, 2023)).
UPDATE: On December 8, 2022, the court issued an order granting the Consent Judgment and Permanent Injunction.
On December 6, 2022, the parties in the long-running litigation between now-defunct data analytics company hiQ Labs, Inc. (“hiQ”) and LinkedIn Corp. (“LinkedIn”) filed a Stipulation and Proposed Consent Judgment (the “Stipulation”) with the California district court, indicating that they have reached a confidential settlement agreement resolving all outstanding claims in the case.
This case has been a litigation odyssey of sorts, to the Supreme Court and back: it started with the original district court injunction in 2017, Ninth Circuit affirmance in 2019, Supreme Court vacating of the order in 2021, Ninth Circuit issuing a new order in April 2022 affirming the original injunction, and back again where we started, the lower court in August 2022 issuing an order dissolving the preliminary injunction, and the most recent mixed ruling on November 4th, 2022. It certainly has been one of the most heavily-litigated scraping cases in recent memory and has been closely followed on our blog. Practically speaking, though, the dispute had essentially reached its logical end with the last court ruling in November – hiQ had prevailed on the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) “unauthorized access” issue related to public website data but was facing a ruling that it had breached LinkedIn’s User Agreement due to its scraping and creation of fake accounts (subject to its equitable defenses).
On November 15, 2022, a California district court declined to dismiss a declaratory judgment action brought by a data scraper, 3taps, Inc. (“3taps”), against LinkedIn Corp. (“LinkedIn”). (3taps, Inc. v. LinkedIn Corp., No. 18-00855 (N.D. Cal. Nov. 15, 2022)). 3taps is seeking an order to clarify whether the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) (or its California state law counterpart) prevents it from accessing and using publicly-available data on LinkedIn, and whether scraping such data would also subject it to an action brought by LinkedIn for breach of contract or trespass.
This is not 3tap’s first experience with scraping litigation (see prior post). But if this dispute sounds strangely familiar and reminiscent of the long-running dispute between hiQ Labs and LinkedIn (which we’ve followed closely), it is. The 3taps action traces its origin, in part, to the original hiQ ruling in August 2017, where this same judge first granted a preliminary injunction in favor of hiQ, enjoining LinkedIn from blocking hiQ’s access to LinkedIn members’ public profiles. Following that ruling, 3taps sent a letter to LinkedIn stating that it also intended to scrape publicly-available data from LinkedIn. LinkedIn responded that while it was not considering legal action against 3taps, it cautioned that “any further access by 3taps to the LinkedIn website and LinkedIn’s servers is without LinkedIn’s or its members’ authorization.” Thus, the hiQ ruling, 3taps’s letter to LinkedIn, and LinkedIn’s reply were the genesis of the current declaratory judgment action filed by 3taps against LinkedIn.[1]
On November 4, 2022, a California district court took up the parties cross-motions for summary judgment in the long-running scraping litigation involving social media site LinkedIn Corp.’s (“LinkedIn”) challenge to data analytics firm hiQ Labs, Inc.’s (“hiQ”) scraping of LinkedIn public profile data. (hiQ Labs, Inc. v. LinkedIn Corp., No. 17-3301 (N.D. Cal. Nov. 4, 2022)). The court mostly denied both parties’ motions for summary judgment on the principal scraping-related issues related to breach of contract and CFAA liability. While the court found that hiQ breached LinkedIn’s User Agreement both through its own scraping of LinkedIn’s site and using scraped data, and through its use of independent contractors (so-called “turkers”), who logged into LinkedIn to run quality assurance for hiQ’s “people analytics” product, there were factual issues surrounding hiQ’s waiver and estoppel defenses to its own scraping activities that foreclosed a judgment in favor of either party on that claim. Similarly, the court found material issues of fact which prevented a ruling on hiQ’s statute of limitations defense to LinkedIn’s claims under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) based on emails exchanged among LinkedIn staff back in 2014 about hiQ’s activities that may or may not have given LinkedIn constructive knowledge about hiQ’s scraping activities and started the statute of limitations clock.
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