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…
We recently reported on the Facebook v. Power Ventures case, in which Facebook alleged, among other things, that Power.com using automated tools to populate a portal that aggregates a user’s social networking profiles violates its terms of service and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and an analogous provision of…
Many people routinely click on the Agree button without reading the terms of service. Doing so can be perilous for many reasons. A pending case highlights another potential reason to read and abide by the terms of service – potential criminal liability. Granted, there are some unique facts here as…