hiQ Labs v. LinkedIn

hiQ Labs, Inc. v. LinkedIn Corp, 938 F.3d 985 (9th Cir. 2019), was a United States Ninth Circuit case about web scraping. The 9th Circuit affirmed the district court's preliminary injunction, preventing LinkedIn from denying the plaintiff, hiQ Labs, from accessing LinkedIn's publicly available LinkedIn member profiles. hiQ is a small data analytics company that used automated bots to scrape information from public LinkedIn profiles.

hiQ Labs, Inc. v. LinkedIn Corp
CourtUnited States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit
Decided9 September 2019
Court membership
Judge(s) sittingMarsha S. Berzon, John Clifford Wallace

Background

LinkedIn served hiQ with a cease-and-desist, demanding that hiQ cease its activity of accessing and copying data from LinkedIn's server. hiQ filed suit against LinkedIn, seeking both injunctive relief under California law and a declaratory judgment to prevent LinkedIn from lawfully invoking the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), California Penal Code § 502(c), or the common law of trespass against hiQ.

District Court


Ninth Circuit

The Ninth Circuit affirmed the district court's award of a preliminary injunction in hiQ's favor, finding that "hiQ established a likelihood of irreparable harm because the survival of its business was threatened."[1]

The Ninth Circuit held that there was no abuse of discretion by the district court where the court had found that even if some LinkedIn users retained their privacy despite their public status, as they were not scraped, such privacy interests did not outweigh hiQ's interest in maintaining its business.

In balancing the hardships, the Ninth Circuit determined it weighed in favor of hiQ. Further, the Ninth Circuit noted that hiQ posed serious concerns with regards to "(1) the merits of its claim for tortious interference with contract, alleging that LinkedIn intentionally interfered with its contracts with third parties, and (2) the merits of LinkedIn’s legitimate business purpose defense."[1]

Additionally, there was a serious contention as to whether the CFAA preempted hiQ's state law causes of action, specifically because the CFAA prohibits accessing a computer without authorization or exceeding one's authorization to obtain information from a protected computer. LinkedIn asserted that following the receipt of its cease-and-desist letter, hiQ's scraping and further use of its data without authorization fell within the meaning of "without authorization" within the CFAA.

The Ninth Circuit affirmed the district court's finding that public interest favored the granting of a preliminary injunction. In his concurring opinion, Judge Wallace specified his concern about the appeal of a preliminary injunction initiated in order to obtain an appellate court's take on the merits.

Ultimately, the Ninth Circuit's affirmation of the district court's grant of the preliminary injunction prohibited LinkedIn from denying hiQ access to publicly available data on public LinkedIn users' profiles.

Implications

The Ninth Circuit's declaration that selectively banning potential competitors from accessing and using data that is publicly available can be considered unfair competition under California law may have large implication for antitrust law.

LinkedIn expressed intent to escalate the case to the Supreme Court.[2]

References
  1. "hiQ Labs, Inc. v. LinkedIn Corp., No. 17-16783 (9th Cir. 2019)". Justia. Retrieved 3 June 2020.
  2. Davis, Wendy (15 November 2019). "LinkedIn To Ask Supreme Court To Intervene In Scraping Battle With HiQ". www.mediapost.com.
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