Jan 30, 2020 23:00:00

The court admits that information published on the Internet is 'not subject to legal protection'

The

Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) , one of the laws of the United States, was enacted in 1986 to protect sensitive information such as military and financial information, and is still the basic law on information protection in the United States. As for the information to which the CFAA applies, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has admitted that the published information is outside the scope of the law.

US court fully legalized website scraping and technically prohibited it --Parsers
https://parsers.me/us-court-fully-legalized-website-scraping-and-technically-prohibited-it/

hiQ Labs, Inc. v. LinkedIn Corp., No. 17-16783 (9th Cir. 2019) :: Justia
https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca9/17-16783/17-16783-2019-09-09.html

The legal interpretation of CFAA has been debated on the court stage. Since 2017, a lawsuit has been filed between Microsoft's subsidiary LinkedIn and data analysis company hiQ Labs over web scraping that automatically extracts information from websites, and hiQ Labs has won the first instance. increase.

Court judges that there is no problem in utilizing LinkedIn's public information for scraping --GIGAZINE

LinkedIn then appealed to the Federal Court of Appeals, where hiQ Labs also had a winning decision.

Victory! Ruling in hiQ v. Linkedin Protects Scraping of Public Data | Electronic Frontier Foundation
https://www.eff.org/ja/deeplinks/2019/09/victory-ruling-hiq-v-linkedin-protects-scraping-public-data

At the time of the decision, the Federal Court of Appeals did not mention the scope of CFAA itself, but in 2020, 'CFAA is a law that regulates the intentional extraction of information of a specific person by hacking etc. It applies only to information that cannot be viewed without certification, 'he said, agreeing with the opinion of the lower court.

He also said he agreed to the ruling 'Prohibit LinkedIn from interfering with hiQ scraping,' which was mentioned in the lower court, and said that this ruling would undermine the issue of handling public information. ..