Court Rules That ‘Scraping’ Public Website Data Isn’t Hacking

Scraping public data from a website doesn’t constitute “hacking,” according to a new court ruling that could dramatically limit abuse of the United States’ primary hacking law. From a report: The ruling comes after a lengthy battle between data analytics firm HiQ Labs and Microsoft owned LinkedIn, which have been at each other’s throats for several years over HiQ Labs’ practice…

Web Scraping Doesn’t Violate Anti-Hacking Law, Appeal Court Rules

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Scraping a public website without the approval of the website’s owner isn’t a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, an appeals court ruled on Monday. The ruling comes in a legal battle that pits Microsoft-owned LinkedIn against a small data-analytics company called hiQ Labs. HiQ scrapes data from the public…