<story><title>LinkedIn loses appeal over access to user profiles</title><url>https://www.reuters.com/article/us-microsoft-linkedin-profiles/microsofts-linkedin-loses-appeal-over-access-to-user-profiles-idUSKCN1VU21W</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pixelmonkey</author><text>The summary here is that LinkedIn tried to argue that it could prevent scraping of public LinkedIn profile data under their ToS, but the courts have ruled that if data is public and provided by users, it can be scraped&amp;#x2F;crawled, that is, it isn’t LinkedIn property. This is generally a positive outcome for people&amp;#x2F;companies turning web text and HTML into structured data, e.g. tools like Puppeteer and Scrapy can be used more freely on sites like LinkedIn, Twitter, and Reddit. Now, you might still get into trouble if you re-publish that data, but you can, at least, safely use the data ”internally”, and the act of scraping&amp;#x2F;crawling (politely) is not, per se, something unlawful.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>eagsalazar2</author><text>Not sure &amp;quot;isn&amp;#x27;t LinkedIn property&amp;quot; is accurate here.  They still retain ownership and control of redistribution just like any other IP.  This is more of a philosophical question about whether &amp;quot;viewing&amp;quot; itself is a violation of their ownership rights and really about the definitions of &amp;quot;viewing&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;public&amp;quot; in the context of the internet.&lt;p&gt;Seems like they&amp;#x27;ve simply determined that viewing any freely accessible URL is &amp;quot;public&amp;quot; and that &amp;quot;viewing&amp;quot; does include scraping.  This seems like a very reasonable determination as it maps pretty neatly to how we think about viewing public content IRL where I am free to drive down the road (for profit or pleasure) and record publicly viewable signage and activities and use that data any way I see fit.</text></comment>
<story><title>LinkedIn loses appeal over access to user profiles</title><url>https://www.reuters.com/article/us-microsoft-linkedin-profiles/microsofts-linkedin-loses-appeal-over-access-to-user-profiles-idUSKCN1VU21W</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pixelmonkey</author><text>The summary here is that LinkedIn tried to argue that it could prevent scraping of public LinkedIn profile data under their ToS, but the courts have ruled that if data is public and provided by users, it can be scraped&amp;#x2F;crawled, that is, it isn’t LinkedIn property. This is generally a positive outcome for people&amp;#x2F;companies turning web text and HTML into structured data, e.g. tools like Puppeteer and Scrapy can be used more freely on sites like LinkedIn, Twitter, and Reddit. Now, you might still get into trouble if you re-publish that data, but you can, at least, safely use the data ”internally”, and the act of scraping&amp;#x2F;crawling (politely) is not, per se, something unlawful.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>giancarlostoro</author><text>I think that&amp;#x27;s fine, but I also think the end-user should decide. With Google (edit: I meant Facebook) I&amp;#x27;m able to determine whether or not I want to show up in search results. This shouldn&amp;#x27;t be an absolute is or isn&amp;#x27;t public situation.</text></comment>