In a ruling that is being hailed as a victory for web scrapers and the open nature of publicly available website data, the Ninth Circuit today issued its long-awaited opinion in hiQ Labs, Inc. v. LinkedIn Corp., No. 17-16783 (9th Cir. Sept. 9, 2019). The crucial question before the court was whether once hiQ Labs, … Continue Reading
This month, an Illinois district court considered another in the series of web scraping disputes that have been working their way through our courts. In this dispute, CouponCabin, Inc. v. PriceTrace, LLC, No. 18-7525 (N.D. Ill. Apr. 11, 2019), CouponCabin alleged that a competitor, PriceTrace, scraped coupon codes from CouponCabin’s website without authorization and displayed … Continue Reading
A recent dispute between an advertiser AXTS Inc. (“AXTS”) and a video production company GY6vids (“GY6”) produced an interesting issue involving the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) – that is, whether an entity that allegedly overloaded another company’s YouTube channel content with a flood of “dislikes” following a contractual dispute is liable under … Continue Reading
UPDATE: On November 1, 2018, the court dismissed the plaintiff’s amended complaint (which apparently dropped the CFAA claim and asserted Lanham Act and DMCA claims). Specifically, the plaintiff asserted, among other things, that defendant removed the copyright management information (CMI) from plaintiff’s listings and website source code. The court ruled that plaintiff failed to show … Continue Reading
UPDATE: On October 22, 2018, the court denied the defendant’s CEO’s motion to dismiss for lack of personal jurisdiction. Subsequently, on January 2, 2019, the parties settled the matter and stipulated to a dismissal of the case. This past week, a Texas district court denied a bid from a web service for a temporary restraining … Continue Reading
Such Scraping “Plausibly Falls within the Ambit of the First Amendment” The Ninth Circuit is currently considering the appeal of the landmark hiQ decision, where a lower court had granted an injunction that limited the applicability of the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) to the blocking of an entity engaging in commercial data … Continue Reading
UPDATE: On February 22, 2018, the district court granted 3taps’s motion to relate its action to the ongoing hiQ v. LinkedIn litigation. This motion was based upon a local Northern District of California rule that holds that cases should be related when the actions concern substantially the same parties, transaction or event, and there would … Continue Reading
A California district court issued an important opinion in a dispute between a ticket sales platform and a ticket broker that employed automated bots to purchase tickets in bulk. (Ticketmaster L.L.C. v. Prestige Entertainment, Inc., No. 17-07232 (C.D. Cal. Jan. 31, 2018)). For those of us who have been following the evolution of the law … Continue Reading
UPDATE: On September 27, 2018, the Supreme Court granted Rimini Street, Inc.’s petition for a writ of certiorari asking the Court to review part of the multi-million dollar damage award against it for costs and resolve an apparent circuit split over whether so-called “non-taxable costs” may be awarded under the Copyright Act (which allows for … Continue Reading
This past week, the Supreme Court denied the petitions for certiorari in two noteworthy Ninth Circuit decisions that had interpreted the scope of liability under the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) in the context of wrongful access of company networks by employees and in instances involving unwanted data scraping from publicly available websites. … Continue Reading
In a new development in an important scraping dispute, LinkedIn appealed the lower court’s decision to grant a preliminary injunction compelling LinkedIn to disable any technical measures it had employed to block the defendant’s data scraping activities. LinkedIn’s brief was filed on October 3, 2017. In it, LinkedIn asserts that the relevant issue is whether the lower … Continue Reading
A Green Light for Screen Scraping? Proceed With Caution… UPDATE: As expected, LinkedIn appealed the lower court’s decision to grant a preliminary injunction compelling LinkedIn to disable any technical measures it had employed to block the defendant’s data scraping activities. LinkedIn’s brief was filed on October 3, 2017. In it, LinkedIn asserts that the relevant … Continue Reading
UPDATE: On January 18, 2019, the Ninth Circuit affirmed the award of damages and injunctive relief in favor of Facebook. (Facebook, Inc. v. Power Ventures, Inc., No. 17-16161 (9th Cir. Jan. 18, 2019) (unpublished)). The California district court in 2017 had awarded Facebook almost $80,000 in CFAA damages, representing only the period after Facebook sent its … Continue Reading
Operators of public-facing websites are typically concerned about the unauthorized, technology-based extraction of large volumes of information from their sites, often by competitors or others in related businesses. The practice, usually referred to as screen scraping, web harvesting, crawling or spidering, has been the subject of many questions and a fair amount of litigation over … Continue Reading
In the game Monopoly, lucky players landing on Community Chest might turn over the highly desirable “Bank Error in Your Favor, Collect $200” card. By the next turn, the proceeds are usually invested in properties and houses, yet, some might wonder whether accepting such a windfall was proper in the first place…or could lead to … Continue Reading
The Ninth Circuit, sitting en banc, has upheld a district court’s dismissal of criminal charges under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act that were predicated on misappropriation of proprietary documents in violation of the employer’s computer use policy. United States v. Nosal, No. 10-10038, 2012 U.S. App. LEXIS 7151 (9th Cir. Apr. 10, 2012). The ruling … Continue Reading
On October 27, 2011, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit agreed to rehear the appeal in United States v. Nosal, 642 F.3d 781 (9th Cir. Apr. 28, 2011). Nosal involves a prosecution under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act for alleged employee theft of confidential data from an employer’s network for … Continue Reading
A panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has ruled that an employee’s violation of an employer’s computer use policy can support a criminal charge of exceeding authorized access under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. United States v. Nosal, No. 10-10038 (9th Cir. Apr. 28, 2011). The case involved access … Continue Reading
UPDATE: As discussed in this blog post, a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit overruled the district court in United States v. Nosal (9th Cir. Apr. 28, 2011). ******** The debate over the applicability of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act in cases of alleged employee disloyalty has yielded quite … Continue Reading
The federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, 18 U.S.C. §1030, criminalizes access to a computer that is either "without authorization" or that "exceed[s] authorized access," and provides a civil right of action for violations as well. In the last several years, a split has developed in the federal courts on the question of whether an … Continue Reading
