What is this crap? "The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals let stand an August 2017 preliminary injunction that required LinkedIn, a Microsoft Corp unit with more than 645 million members, to give hiQ Labs Inc access to publicly available member profiles." https://www.reuters.com/article/us-microsoft-linkedin-profiles-idUSKCN1VU21W
That’s a good ruling from the courts
Doesn’t google do the same thing?
This is bullshit. Put LinkedIn aside and consider the impact of this ruling on other companies that had an innovative idea to collect and share non-copyright information on internet for public . Companies like IMDb, craigslist or Wikipedia (it’s a pretty long list) With this ruling it’s totally legal to say, I have Craigslist data for sale (ironically on Craigslist itself).
If your business is aggregating data other people give you for free and publishing that data, you should expect others to use it in whatever way they see fit. It's not like you're creating original content. What makes you think LinkedIn has the right to use the courts to enforce not just whether machines can be used to view your data, but WHICH machines (you obviously still want Google crawlers using it)
Google is beneficial for us as far as I know because of SEO and SEM. Serving this data is costly and we have to pay if people scraping these assets. The issue is LinkedIn were creative to be one of the first company to collect these data and provide other values to our members. You might be skeptical about LinkedIn because of all the fiasco related to social media. Think about Craigslist do you think it’s fair to them that someone sells their data? And some other rich company buy this data (or scrape it) and create an interface and with better marketing destroying Craigslist business?
Makes sense to me. If you want your data to be private, make it private. If you post it publicly don't whine when some people use machines to slurp it up.
In my mind it's no different than a restaurant refusing service to someone
In my mind it's like Costco whining about you taking 3 free sample saussages instead of the whole tray.