Roughly two weeks apart, on July 21, 2022 and August 5, 2022, respectively, Amazon made headlines for agreeing to acquire One Medical, “a human-centered and technology-powered primary care organization,” for approximately $3.9 billion and iRobot, a global consumer robot company, known for its creation of the Roomba vacuum,
data aggregation
Data Aggregator Seeks Ruling Allowing It to Scrape Public LinkedIn Data
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 be an “unduly burdensome duplication of labor…or conflicting results” if the cases were heard before different judges. As a result, the 3taps case, over the opposition of LinkedIn, was reassigned to Judge Edward Chen, who also presided over the lower court proceedings in the hiQ v. LinkedIn litigation.
In the latest development in the legal controversy over scraping, 3taps, Inc. (“3taps”), a data aggregator and “exchange platform” for developers, filed suit against LinkedIn seeking a declaratory judgment that 3taps would not be in violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) if it accesses and collects publicly-available data from LinkedIn’s website. (3Taps Inc. v. LinkedIn Corp., No. 18-00855 (C.D. Cal. filed Feb. 8, 2018)). The basis of 3Taps’s complaint is last year’s hotly-debated California district court ruling (hiQ Labs, Inc. v. LinkedIn, Corp., 2017 WL 3473663 (N.D. Cal. Aug. 14, 2017)), where the court granted a preliminary injunction compelling LinkedIn to disable any technical measures it had employed to block a data analytics company from scraping the publicly available data on LinkedIn’s website. The hiQ ruling essentially limited the applicability of the CFAA as a tool against the scraping of publicly-available website data. [For an analysis of the hiQ lower court decision, please read the Client Alert on our website].