Cyberside Chats: Everyone wants to be Batman. Hacking Back & Cybersecurity Law
Looking back at 2021 and ahead to 2022
Monthly Minute | Protecting Against Data Scrapers
Death of Activist Aaron Swartz Could Spur Changes to Computer Fraud & Abuse Act
Employer’s Takeover of Former CEO’s LinkedIn Account Lawful Under CFAA
In a recent post, we recounted the myriad of issues raised by recently-filed data scraping suits involving job listings, company reviews and employment data. Soon after, another interesting scraping suit was filed, this time...more
Shrewd businesses often leverage cutting-edge technology to be more efficient or to offer new products or services. But if companies fail to conduct legal risk assessments before using innovative technology, the anticipated...more
In recent years there has been a great demand for information about job listings, company reviews and employment data. Recruiters, consultants, analysts and employment-related service providers, amongst others, are...more
The New York Knicks just sued their former employee and his new employer, the Toronto Raptors, in a case that can teach employers a lot about trade secret misappropriation. The August 21 lawsuit accuses their Eastern...more
X Corp (formerly Twitter) has cracked down on data scrapers in a series of lawsuits filed within the last several weeks. One lawsuit targets an Israel-based research firm that provides commercial data scraping, called Bright...more
2022 provided companies with further clarity and insight regarding legal claims that might be viable to stop data (or web) scraping and those that likely won’t work. Data scraping continues to become an increasingly popular...more
Following up on our April 27, 2022 post, Data Scraping Deemed Legal in Certain Circumstances, the most significant data scraping lawsuit has finally come to an end. After six years of litigation, LinkedIn Corp. and hiQ Labs,...more
Pandora’s Virtual Try-On Tool Leads to BIPA Class Complaint - On November 15, 2022, a group of plaintiffs brought a purported class action against Pandora Jewelry LLC, claiming that its virtual try-on tool violates...more
UPDATE: On December 8, 2022, the court issued an order granting the Consent Judgment and Permanent Injunction. On December 6, 2022, the parties in the long-running litigation between now-defunct data analytics company hiQ...more
On November 4, 2022, a California district court took up the parties cross-motions for summary judgment in the long-running scraping litigation involving social media site LinkedIn Corp.’s (“LinkedIn”) challenge to data...more
On September 30, 2021, a Texas district court granted Southwest Airline Co.’s (“Southwest”) request for a preliminary injunction against online travel site Kiwi.com, Inc. (“Kiwi”), barring Kiwi from, among other things,...more
You may be able to bring a misappropriation of trade secrets claim even if you do not actually own the misappropriated trade secret. A growing number of federal cases indicate ownership of a trade secret may not be required...more
This week’s Update contains something for everyone – currencies and payments, infringement claims and acquisitions. Enjoy....more
On January 14, 2021, Southwest Airlines Co. (“Southwest”) filed a complaint in a Texas district court against an online travel site, Kiwi.com, Inc. (“Kiwi”), alleging, among other things, that Kiwi’s scraping of fare...more
After more than three years of litigation and two rounds of extensive discovery, in Calendar Research LLC v. StubHub, Inc., et al., 2:17-cv-04062-SVW-SS, the United States District Court for the Central District of California...more
In continuing its push to enforce its terms and policies against developers that engage in unauthorized collection or scraping of user data, Facebook brought suit last month against mobile marketing and data analytics firm...more
The ink is barely dry on the landmark Ninth Circuit hiQ Labs decision. Yet, a new dispute has already cropped up testing the bounds of the CFAA and the ability of a platform to enforce terms restricting unauthorized scraping...more
The ability of companies to prevent scraping of their publicly available information may now be limited. In a highly anticipated decision, the Ninth Circuit ruled on September 9, 2019, that scraping data from the public...more
Two recent web scraping disputes highlight some important issues regarding whether a website owner may successfully allege a breach of contract action against a commercial party that has scraped website content contrary to...more
This month, an Illinois district court considered another in the series of web scraping disputes that have been working their way through our courts. In this dispute, CouponCabin, Inc. v. PriceTrace, LLC, No. 18-7525 (N.D....more
The public's increasing reliance on anonymous product and company reviews posted online often gives rise to complaints by the subjects of those reviews, especially when the reviews are negative or critical, and threaten to...more
A recent dispute between an advertiser AXTS Inc. (“AXTS”) and a video production company GY6vids (“GY6”) produced an interesting issue involving the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) – that is, whether an entity...more
On Friday, the WSJ published an article detailing how companies are monetizing smartphone location data by selling it to hedge fund clients. The data vendor featured in the WSJ article obtains geolocation data from about...more
This past week, an Illinois district court dismissed, with leave to amend, claims relating to a competitor’s alleged scraping of sales listings from a company’s website for use on its own site. (Alan Ross Machinery Corp. v....more
Such Scraping “Plausibly Falls within the Ambit of the First Amendment” The Ninth Circuit is currently considering the appeal of the landmark hiQ decision, where a lower court had granted an injunction that limited the...more