Two recent web scraping disputes highlight some important issues regarding whether a website owner may successfully allege a breach of contract action against a commercial party that has scraped website content contrary to “clickwrap” and “browsewrap” website terms of use. In Southwest Airlines Co. v. Roundpipe, LLC, No. 18-0033 (N.D. Tex. Mar. 22, 2019), a … 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
Yes, it’s time for the end-of-year blog post – a look back at interesting issues of 2018 and a look forward to what we see coming down the pike in the new year. The Look Back In the past year, blockchain buzz was everywhere. Although still early, blockchain has in fact began to show promise … 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
In a blog post last month, Google announced that it would extend certain commitments it made to the FTC in 2012 that were set to expire relating to, among other things, the scraping of third-party content for use on certain Google “vertical search” properties such as Google Shopping. The announcement came days before the commitments … 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
Craigslist has used a variety of technological and legal methods to prevent unauthorized parties from violating its terms of use by scraping, linking to, or accessing user postings for their own commercial purposes. For example, in April, craigslist obtained a $60.5 million judgment against a real estate listings site that had allegedly received scraped craigslist … 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
Screen scraping is a problem that has vexed website owners since the early days of e-commerce – how to make valuable content available to users and customers, but prevent competitors from accessing such content for commercial purposes. Even in the advent of social media, mobile commerce, and advanced software, the issue remains relevant to today’s … Continue Reading
For years, craigslist has aggressively used technological and legal methods to prevent unauthorized parties from violating its terms of use by scraping, linking to or accessing user postings for their own commercial purposes. In its latest judicial victory, on April 13, 2017, craigslist obtained a $60.5 million judgment against Radpad on various claims relating to … 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
For years, craigslist has aggressively used technological and legal methods to prevent unauthorized parties from scraping, linking to or accessing user postings for their own commercial purposes. In a prior post, we briefly discussed craigslist’s action against a certain aggregator that was scraping content from the craigslist site (despite having received a cease and desist … 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
It’s a problem that has vexed website owners since the days of the dot-com boom – how to make certain user-generated content available to users or subscribers, but also prevent competitors and other unauthorized parties from scraping, linking to or otherwise accessing that content for their own commercial purposes. The law on scraping and linking … Continue Reading
In 2007, Ticketmaster brought a multi-count complaint against RMG Technologies, a software company that supplied ticket brokers with software that enabled them to automatically and rapidly access Ticketmaster’s Web site, to the detriment of ordinary users seeking tickets to popular events. The Ticketmaster v. RMG complaint was notable for stating a series of claims that … Continue Reading
