A US appeals court reaffirms that scraping publicly accessible content on the internet is legal, ending a landmark case LinkedIn brought against rival Hiq Labs
Good news for archivists, academics, researchers and journalists: scraping publicly accessible data is legal, according to a U.S. appeals court ruling.
Context & Ripple Effects
LinkedIn’s effort to block hiQ has moved through years of litigation: a 2017 order required it to remove technical barriers, and a 2019 appeals decision had already rejected LinkedIn’s bid to stop the scraping. The Supreme Court then sent that earlier outcome back for reconsideration in 2021, making the renewed appeals ruling the case’s decisive resolution.
The dispute sets a practical boundary between information made publicly accessible and data behind access controls. It matters beyond the two companies because the article identifies researchers, journalists, academics, and archivists as direct users of public-web data.
First-order effects
- HiQ Labs can scrape LinkedIn’s publicly accessible profile data without LinkedIn using the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act claim at issue to stop it.
- LinkedIn loses a litigation route it had pursued against public-profile scraping, following its earlier campaign against anonymous data scrapers.
Second-order effects
- Researchers, journalists, academics, and archivists gain clearer legal support for collecting publicly accessible online material, while platforms have greater incentive to separate public pages from access-controlled data.
- Competitors that depend on public-web collection face a more defined permission boundary: public availability matters, whereas LinkedIn’s ability to restrict nonpublic data is not resolved by this account.
Third-order effects
- If courts continue to preserve this distinction, platform control over data will increasingly rest on product access design and user-facing permissions rather than claims against scraping of openly available pages.
- The ruling strengthens a public-data permission boundary in which data businesses must distinguish collection of public signals from use of protected or restricted datasets.
The trend: Internet data rights are being organized around the boundary between openly accessible information and platform-controlled access, rather than a blanket platform veto over collection.