Webscraping and Computer Fraud and Abuse Act Claims After hiQ

On September 9, 2019, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit affirmed a lower court’s order granting a preliminary injunction barring LinkedIn from blocking hiQ Labs, a data analytics company, from accessing and scraping publicly available LinkedIn member profiles. More recently, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a criminal appeal, Van Buren v. United States, to determine if the Computer Fraud & Abuse Act applies to authorized computer system users who access information for unauthorized purposes. This webinar will discuss the impact of the hiQ decision, and forecast how the Supreme Court’s upcoming decision will impact the law in this area. Our speakers will focus on the following questions:

(1) is the hiQ decision and other cases that have followed essentially a greenlight for the scraping of public-facing websites;
(2) how do you differentiate between “information presumptively accessible to the general public” and information for which authorization is generally required;
(3) will common law claims still be viable following these decisions;
(4) what do sites that want to prevent scraping of their data have to do in the aftermath of hiQ?;
(5) does the recent passage of the CCPA change the demand and desirability of scraped data, at least in the context of social media?; and
(6) how might the Supreme Court’s interpretation of “exceeds authorized access” to a computer impact the future of online scraping?

Organized by BCLT. Contact Nathalie ([email protected]) with any questions.