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psyon t1_jdogs3g wrote

Reply to comment by slashinvestor in Microsoft reportedly orders AI chatbot rivals to stop using Bing’s search data by OutlandishnessOk2452

There was a court case I think involved Linked-In that was like this. A different company built a business from scraping their public pages, then Linked-in blocked them and got sued. Courts sided with the other business.

edit i have been corrected. HiQ was initially granted an injunction that prevented LinkedIn from preventing scraping. That injunction was initially upheld by the appeals court. It was later vacated and LinkedIn won the case.

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drysart t1_jdp0y1f wrote

LinkedIn won that case because the data that was being scraped didn't belong to LinkedIn (it belonged to the users who submitted it), so they had no grounds to claim copyright protection over it, and because the scraper otherwise had no contractual relationship with LinkedIn that would preclude them from doing so.

This is not that case.

Definitely for the former reason; since it involves the Bing API, which you do have to agree to a contract with Microsoft for access to and is not available non-authenticated or anonymously -- so normal contract law applies and if the terms of the contract say "you can't use this API to do that" then you can't use that API to do that.

And very possibly for the former reason too; since it's not the content of the indexed pages that being used but the compilation and organization of it; which courts have held is copyrightable even if you don't own the specific pieces of content themselves. Bing doesn't have copyright over the pages indexed, but they very likely could claim copyright over the fact that their search returns those specific results.

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pixel_of_moral_decay t1_jdpshin wrote

That’s not entirely correct. LinkedIn has copyright on the presentation. Data can not be copyrighted.

Scraping isn’t a right, any website can block or restrict scrapers regardless of content rights since there’s no SLA in place. Which is ultimately what it comes down to.

Users don’t really have a say in terms of the content they submit. They give LinkedIn the right to do pretty much anything with the data.

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gizamo t1_jdpk4ob wrote

That's incorrect . LinkedIn won that case.

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