- Reminds me of CraigsList vs PadMapper[1]. In that scenario I side with CL -- it was right to block PM. PM or others should not be allowed to build a new UI on top of CL because CL was the one that put in years of effort of nurturing its listings, its network, building brand equity and taking associated risks and costs.
- As others have highlighted, the data is publicly accessibly and there is no agreement the scraper/crawler is bound by. The agreement is between the LinkedIn user and LinkedIn. The scraper is connected to the Internet pipe crawling the Internet freely as it wants. It's not reproducing the data anywhere so copyright should not be an issue.
- What if a scraper didn't scrape LinkedIn but just the Google or Archive.org cached versions and read those instead? It would not be pressuring LinkedIn server resources in this case.
- What if all of my employees allow me to scrape their LinkedIn data? Can I scrape all of their info? Can LinkedIn stop me from doing that (In the case of Facebook vs Power Ventures, the answer is that LinkedIn would be able to prevent this behaviour).
- Who owns the data? Medium.com doesn't own the posts. LinkedIn doesn't own the CVs.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4286325