HiQ Labs v.
LinkedIn
hiQ Labs, Inc. v. LinkedIn Corp., 938 F.3d 985 (9th Cir. 2019),
hiQ Labs, Inc. v. LinkedIn
was a United States Ninth Circuit case about web scraping. The
9th Circuit affirmed the district court's preliminary injunction, Corp
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.
The court ruled for hiQ and the right to do web scraping.[1][2][3]
However, the Supreme Court, based on its Van Buren v. United
States decision,[4] vacated the decision and remanded the case for
further review in June 2021. In a second ruling in April 2022 the
Ninth Circuit affirmed its decision.[5][6] In a November 2022
Court United States Court
ruling the Ninth Circuit ruled that hiQ had breached LinkedIn's
User Agreement and a settlement agreement was reached between of Appeals for the
the two parties. [7] Ninth Circuit
Decided 9 September 2019
Background Citation(s) 938 F.3d 985 (http
s://www.leagle.com/
LinkedIn served hiQ with a cease-and-desist, demanding that hiQ decision/infco20190
cease its activity of accessing and copying data from LinkedIn's 909084)
server. hiQ filed suit against LinkedIn, seeking both injunctive
Case history
relief under California law and a declaratory judgment to prevent
LinkedIn from lawfully invoking the Computer Fraud and Abuse Prior 273 F. Supp. 3d
Act (CFAA), the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), action(s) 1099 (https://www.le
California Penal Code § 502(c), or the common law of trespass agle.com/decision/i
against hiQ. nfdco20170817626)
(N.D. Cal. 2017)
Ninth Circuit Subsequent Cert. granted,
action(s) judgment vacated,
The Ninth Circuit affirmed the district court's award of a 141 S. Ct. 2752,
preliminary injunction in hiQ's favor, finding that "hiQ established 210 L. Ed. 2d 902
a likelihood of irreparable harm because the survival of its business (2021);
was threatened."[8] Adhered to on
The Ninth Circuit held that there was no abuse of discretion by the remand, 31 F.4th
district court where the court had found that even if some LinkedIn 1180 (https://casete
users retained their privacy despite their public status, as they were xt.com/case/hiq-lab
not scraped, such privacy interests did not outweigh hiQ's interest s-inc-v-linkedin-corp
in maintaining its business. -5) (9th Cir. 2022)
Court membership
In balancing the hardships, the Ninth Circuit determined it
weighed in favor of hiQ. Further, the Ninth Circuit noted that hiQ Judge(s) Marsha Berzon,
posed serious concerns with regards to "(1) the merits of its claim sitting John Clifford
for tortious interference with contract, alleging that LinkedIn Wallace, Terrence
intentionally interfered with its contracts with third parties, and (2) Berg
the merits of LinkedIn’s legitimate business purpose defense."[8]
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.
Supreme Court
LinkedIn petitioned the Supreme Court to review the Ninth Circuit's decision.[9] In an order on June 14,
2021,[10] the Supreme Court vacated the Ninth Circuit's decision on the basis of their ruling on CFAA the
week prior in Van Buren v. United States, which had ruled that the "exceeds authorized access" of CFAA
only applies when an individual has valid access to a system but accesses parts of a system they are not
intended to access.[4] The case was remanded to the Ninth Circuit for further review under Van Buren.[11]
In a second ruling in April 2022 the Ninth Circuit affirmed its decision.[5][6]
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.
Other countries with laws to prevent monopolistic practices or anti-trust laws may also see similar disputes
and prospectively judgements hailing commercial use of publicly accessible information. While there is
global precedence by virtue of large companies such as Thompson Reuters, Bloomberg or Google
effectively using web-scraping or crawling to aggregate information from disparate sources across the web,
fundamentally the judgement by Ninth Circuit fortifies the lack of enforceability of browse-wrap
agreements over conduct of trade using publicly available information.
References
1. Crocker, Andrew; Fischer, Camille (10 September 2019). "Victory! Ruling in hiQ v. Linkedin
Protects Scraping of Public Data" (https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/09/victory-ruling-hiq-v-
linkedin-protects-scraping-public-data). Electronic Frontier Foundation.
2. Katris, Basileios "Bill"; Schaul, Robert J. (30 September 2019). "Data Scraping Survives! (At
Least for Now) Key Takeaways from 9th Circuit Ruling on the HIQ vs. Linkedin Case" (http
s://www.natlawreview.com/article/data-scraping-survives-least-now-key-takeaways-9th-circu
it-ruling-hiq-vs-linkedin). The National Law Review.
3. Heimes, Rita (20 September 2019). "Data scraping and the implications of the latest
LinkedIn-hiQ court ruling" (https://iapp.org/news/a/data-scraping-and-the-implications-of-the-
latest-linkedin-hiq-court-ruling/). iapp.org. International Association of Privacy Professionals.
4. Van Buren v. United States, No. 19-783 (https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/593/19-
783/), 593 U.S. ___, 141 S. Ct. 1648, 210 L. Ed. 2d 26 (2021).
5. hiQ Labs v. LinkedIn Corp., 31 F.4th 1180 (https://casetext.com/case/hiq-labs-inc-v-linkedin-c
orp-5) (9th Cir. 2022).
6. Whittaker, Zack (18 April 2022). "Web scraping is legal, US appeals court reaffirms" (https://t
echcrunch.com/2022/04/18/web-scraping-legal-court/). TechCrunch.
7. "hiQ and LinkedIn Reach Proposed Settlement in Landmark Scraping Case" (https://www.na
tlawreview.com/article/hiq-and-linkedin-reach-proposed-settlement-landmark-scraping-cas
e). The National Law Review. Retrieved 2022-12-22.
8. hiQ Labs v. LinkedIn Corp., 938 F.3d 985 (https://www.leagle.com/decision/infco2019090908
4) (9th Cir. 2019).
9. Davis, Wendy (15 November 2019). "LinkedIn To Ask Supreme Court To Intervene In
Scraping Battle With HiQ" (https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/343432/linkedin-t
o-ask-supreme-court-to-intervene-in-scra.html). www.mediapost.com.
10. LinkedIn Corp. v. hiQ Labs, Inc., 141 S. Ct. 2752, 210 L. Ed. 2d 902 (2021).
11. Chung, Andrew (June 14, 2021). "U.S. Supreme Court revives LinkedIn bid to shield
personal data" (https://www.reuters.com/technology/us-supreme-court-revives-linkedin-bid-s
hield-personal-data-2021-06-14/). Reuters. Retrieved June 14, 2021.
External links
Text of hiQ Labs, Inc. v. LinkedIn Corp., 938 F.3d 985 (9th Cir. 2019) is available
from: Google Scholar (https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=53075604379088908
06) Justia (https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca9/17-16783/17-16783-201
9-09-09.html) Leagle (https://www.leagle.com/decision/infco20190909084)
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=HiQ_Labs_v._LinkedIn&oldid=1128822683"
