Ninth Circuit Sides With Data Scraper And Affirms Preliminary Injunction Against LinkedIn In Data Mining Battle

In a narrow but notable holding, the Ninth Circuit recently held that the data mining company hiQ won the balance of hardships and identified sufficiently serious merits questions to warrant a preliminary injunction against LinkedIn’s actions to block hiQ from scraping data from public LinkedIn profiles. The ruling allows hiQ to continue mining free data from LinkedIn users’ public profiles and using that data for its own purposes.

As competition for data analytics grows fierce, the Ninth Circuit has disfavored an attempt to lock down publicly available data against competition, signaling caution for those in the business of collecting or hosting such data. 

HiQ’s business model relies on “scraping” public data from public professional profiles (primarily found on LinkedIn) and using those profiles to create data analytics to sell as business insights. HiQ alleged that, for at least two years, LinkedIn had known that hiQ uses bots to scrape data from