Did Data Scraping Just Get A Tiny Bit Safer?

Is it okay to scrape data from another website? This is a frequently asked question that almost always leads to an ambiguous and equivocal answer. Legal practitioners are quick to point out the risks of civil and criminal liability that could be incurred by scraping data from someone else's website, and several lawsuits have been spurred by the practice. This week, the United States District Court for the Northern District of California (the "Court") issued an order in hiQ Labs, Inc. v. LinkedIn Corporation that may foretell of a somewhat safer landscape for some data scrapers.

What is data "scraping"? Basically, it is the process by which a company uses a software algorithm to automatically collect or harvest data. The case at issue concerned a company, hiQ Labs, Inc. ("hiQ"), that developed software to analyze data from public LinkedIn profiles to help employers determine which workers are likely to leave or stay. hiQ's software automatically collects, i.e.,