> So it’s hard to argue that a service which is scraping LinkedIn is doing it without knowledge that they are going against LinkedIn’s wishes.
As far as I can tell, no one has made that argument, so I'm not sure why you feel the need to rebut it.
I think it all pretty much boils down to this quote from the article:
> LinkedIn's position disturbs Orin Kerr, a legal scholar at George Washington University. "You can't publish to the world and then say 'no, you can't look at it,'" Kerr told Ars.
> no one has made that argument, so I'm not sure why you feel the need to rebut it.
The title is "It’s illegal to scrape our website without permission". So that argument is implied in the headline, at least.
As for Orin Kerr, I'm sure he'd agree that there are private parts of the internet (my payment information being an obvious example). Just because something is deployed to the internet doesn't mean it is "published to the world" as he claims.
That is not Kerr's argument. A key point (which he has developed to a very detailed degree, as both a law professor and actively defending people, such as Weev) is the access controls in place.
He's not just bloviating; before you disagree with him, reviewing his arguments is worthwhile. (I do disagree with him in part, and agree with his reasoning but don't like the outcomes in part, but in any case, he's a pretty accomplished lawyer, and I'm not any kind of lawyer, so there's that.)
"Published to the world" is a bit off; I'd compare it more to recording telephone conversations with corporations' public service numbers. They always tell you that you are being recorded (for "training and quality purposes") so they give up their right to not be recorded in turn.
If a company paid a million people to call into an information service hotline and each request one fact from it—and then the company recorded and compiled the answers into their own database to start their own information service—is that illegal?
>If a company paid a million people to call into an information service hotline and each request one fact from it—and then the company recorded and compiled the answers into their own database to start their own information service—is that illegal?
I sure hope not. From there it doesn't seem to far off to claim that "He was really only ever showing up for work to learn some skills and how he's using those skills to run his own business!" sort of lawsuits. If you compile difficult to find but freely available information into a more easy to digest format I see that as virtually always a net positive.
As far as I can tell, no one has made that argument, so I'm not sure why you feel the need to rebut it.
I think it all pretty much boils down to this quote from the article:
> LinkedIn's position disturbs Orin Kerr, a legal scholar at George Washington University. "You can't publish to the world and then say 'no, you can't look at it,'" Kerr told Ars.