Web scraping: legal, illegal, or does it depend on the circumstances?

A US judge has ordered Microsoft to eliminate within 24 hours all technology aimed at preventing hiQ Labs from obtaining public data from LinkedIn via web scraping. Specifically, in granting the appeal by hiQ Labs in response to LinkedIn’s claim that it was illegal to scrape its website without permission, the judge is saying that LinkedIn may not prohibit or block selective access to company data it has made public.

The company, hiQ Labs, says it collects data from various sources to help managers make better decisions about people, basically attracting or retaining talent. The practice of extracting data from a range of services is common among analytics startups, especially at the stage where they attempt to build their service and still do not have enough critical mass to attempt to obtain such data themselves. Such analytics services are becoming more and more common as it becomes easier to obtain useful images of a user from the data they share on the social networks.

On other occasions, such as when Facebook vs. Power Ventures in 2009, the courts have ruled in favor of the site that is the object of scraping: in that case, Power Ventures was offering a service that supposedly consolidated people’s contacts on several social networks into a single page, so that the scraping of the data was…