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)).