The Briefing by the IP Law Blog: Getty Images Sues Stability AI for Copyright Infringement
No Password Required: An FBI Special Agent's Journey from Submarines to Anti-Corruption to Cybersecurity
Monthly Minute | Protecting Against Data Scrapers
June 2020 Monthly Minute | Effectively Protecting Your Data
Selected U.S. Privacy and Cyber Updates - New York AG Seeks Comments on Rulemaking for Minors’ Online Protection Laws - On August 1, 2024, New York Attorney General Letitia James issued two advanced notices of proposed...more
As the prevalence of artificial intelligence (AI) continues to rise, complex questions regarding the regulation of AI data scraping remain relevant to both website owners and web data collection companies. Though many...more
On May 9, 2024, in X Corp. v. Bright Data Ltd., the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California dismissed X’s claims alleging that Bright Data’s access to X’s systems, and scraping and selling of publicly...more
On January 23, 2024, the court in Meta Platforms Inc. v. Bright Data Ltd., Case No. 3:23-cv-00077-EMC (N.D. Cal.), issued a summary judgment ruling with potentially wide-ranging ramifications for the law of scraping and...more
Privacy regulators, including the EU data protection authorities (EU DPAs), are expected to increase their scrutiny of data scraping to train AI algorithms. Data scraping involves the collection of large amounts of publicly...more
The Privacy Commissioner of Canada and other international data protection authorities recently issued a joint statement urging websites and social media platforms to do more to protect personal information from unlawful data...more
X Corp., the company formerly known as Twitter, recently sued Bright Data over its site scraping activities. Bright Data is a data collection company and advertises—among other services—its “website scraping” solutions....more
On August 24, 2023, twelve international data protection and privacy regulators from the Americas, Europe, Africa, and APAC announced their “global expectations of social media platforms and other sites to safeguard against...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
In April, we wrote about how OpenAI had eased the procedure by which ChatGPT users can opt out of their inputs being used for model training purposes (click here for that post). While neither web scraping nor the collection...more
Summary - A class action lawsuit filed against OpenAI and its primary investor, Microsoft, seeks damages and injunctive relief for the alleged theft and commercial misappropriation of consumer personal data processed by and...more
The International Association of Privacy Professionals held its annual Global Privacy Summit on April 4-5 in Washington, D.C. Here are some things we learned. 1. Generative Artificial Intelligence (“AI”) is Ubiquitous in the...more
What does the summary judgment granted to Linkedin in the famous Linkedin-HiQ Labs case teach us about data scraping in the US? Here are some of my thoughts on what the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of...more
Your law firm’s website has a secret, secondary audience: bots! While your site visitors’ opinions matter most, naturally, search engine bots can actually have a bigger impact on the reach and ranking of your attorney...more
On remand from the Supreme Court of the United States, the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit reaffirmed its own 2019 opinion that preliminarily enjoined a professional networking platform from denying a data analytics...more
On April 18, the Ninth Circuit issued its opinion in hiQ Labs, Inc. v. LinkedIn Corporation in which the court clarified its position on an important topic: whether the common practice of data “web scraping” can create...more
In September 2019, the Ninth Circuit held that hiQ Labs, Inc.’s (“hiQ”) collection and use of information that LinkedIn users shared on their public profiles did not violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (“CFAA”) because...more
On April 18, 2022, the Ninth Circuit reaffirmed its narrow interpretation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act’s (CFAA) “without authorization” prong in a data scraping dispute between hiQ and LinkedIn. The opinion upheld a...more
After two decisions by the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, data scraping is deemed legal if the information is publicly accessible on the internet. ...more
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals recently ruled in HiQ Labs, Inc. v. LinkedIn that automated web scraping of publicly accessible websites does not violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), even if the website owner...more
In a much-anticipated ruling this week addressing the confluence of website scraping and computer hacking law, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit became the latest federal court to limit the reach of the Computer...more
On remand from the U.S. Supreme Court, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit reaffirmed a California district court’s order preliminarily enjoining LinkedIn from denying hiQ Labs, a data analytics company, access to...more
Selling web users’ personal data is big business — with a projected worth of $400 billion by 2025. In industries as diverse as health insurance and automobile manufacturing, companies that collect and aggregate user data to...more
For years, website owners have leveraged the federal Computer Fraud & Abuse Act (CFAA) as a tool to combat unauthorized scraping of data and other content from their websites. Due to a circuit court split on the...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