Ninth Circuit Finds (Again) that Automated Web Scraping of Public Sites Is Legal – JD Supra

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals recently ruled in HiQ Labs, Inc. v. LinkedIn that automated web scraping of publicly accessible websites does not violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), even if the website owner objects to the scraping. This marks the second time in this case where the Ninth Circuit found that scraping public websites is not the type of “breaking and entering” into computers that the CFAA prohibits. For background, the CFAA is, at its core, a cybersecurity bill, which prohibits unauthorized access to computers and computer systems. It creates a civil claim for anyone who suffers damages or loss from a person who “intentionally accesses a computer without authorization or exceeds authorized access, and thereby obtains … information from any protected computer.” The term “protected computer” refers to any computer “used in or affecting interstate or foreign commerce or communication,” which effectively means any computer or server connected to the internet. The HiQ case deals with the issue of what constitutes “unauthorized” access of data stored on a publicly accessible website. HiQ’s business involves providing data analytics services using information it gathers from public LinkedIn profiles. To gather that information, HiQ uses automated web-scraping software—a…
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