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Comment by smokeyj | Hacker News Reader

> LinkedIn is not a public service

Boo. OP said it's a service offered to the public. Don't need to move the goal post.

> Whether it's enforceable or not, LinkedIn has a EULA and use of their service, whether you have an account or not, is presumably governed by their license.

Turns out I also have a EULA. And when linkedin responds to my HTTP requests, they opt into my EULA agreement.

It sounds like LinkedIn doesn't want to be accessible from the world wide web. Going offline is always an option.

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> Boo. OP said it's a service offered to the public. Don't need to move the goal post.

Nothing moved. OP also said, in the same sentence, "you cannot then police what users of that data you consider to be 'public' because it serves your business interest." Yes, they can. It is clear from context that OP was suggesting that LinkedIn should be held to the legal standards of a "Public Service" in the government entity sense of the term. This is not the case, LinkedIn has no legal requirement to provide anything to the public. Booing me doesn't change that.

> Turns out I also have a EULA. And when linkedin responds to my HTTP requests, they opt into my EULA agreement.

Good luck with that!

Just like you can't fart in public and charge bystanders for the scent - you can't broadcast facts into the public and expect people not to recall them. I mean, you can. But good luck with that!

> you can't broadcast facts into the public and expect people not to recall them

That's a straw man, that is not the issue here. LinkedIn is not recalling the data, they asked to stop HiQ from scraping and collating their data and using it for their own business.

This is already in the EULA, so what HiQ is doing may already be breaking the law.

8.2 Don'ts You agree that you will not:

k. Develop, support or use software, devices, scripts, robots, or any other means or processes (including crawlers, browser plugins and add-ons, or any other technology or manual work) to scrape the Services or otherwise copy profiles and other data from the Services;

m. Copy, use, disclose or distribute any information obtained from the Services, whether directly or through third parties (such as search engines), without the consent of LinkedIn;

ae. Use bots or other automated methods to access the Services, add or download contacts, send or redirect messages;

(fun fact, not strictly important here) - 8.2.k was added quite recently [1], likely triggered by the HiQ case.

[1] https://blog.linkedin.com/2017/april/10/updates-to-our-terms...

[2] Here https://github.com/tosdr/tosback2/blob/master/crawl/linkedin... is an older version of the ToS, which one can read while enjoying the irony of a crawler focused on scrapping ToS

> LinkedIn is not recalling the data, they asked to stop HiQ from scraping and collating their data and using it for their own business.

It's not LinkedIn's right to tell me how to use facts. Just like I can't make LinkedIn liable for my EULA. It doesn't constitute an actual legal agreement.

That said I think the judge is wrong that LI should remove barriers from accessing the information. Information is speech. To mandate information be suppressed or produced is less than ideal.

> It's not LinkedIn's right to tell me how to use facts.

Yes, you're right about that. But it is LinkedIn's right to tell you how to use their service. Lots of people ignore what they say, and they might not be able to sue someone who breaks their rules, but they can state the rules.

They said they don't want bots scraping their site, and that's their right. They wrote software to detect specific bots & IPs, and refuse service. That's also their right, in my opinion.

Sites who want to use LinkedIn's database are free to collect their own facts instead. I don't know if this is what you were suggesting, but LinkedIn's refusal to serve HiQ's bots is not suppressing any speech, in my view.

> That said I think the judge is wrong that LI should remove barriers from accessing the information.

We totally agree. What are we arguing about?

"Just like you can't fart in public and charge bystanders for the scent - you can't broadcast facts into the public and expect people not to recall them. I mean, you can. But good luck with that! "

Do you also believe you can take the satellite tv signals beamed at your house and decrypt them? After all, they broadcasted them as widely as they possibly could! If they didn't want you to watch them, they shouldn't have sent it to you!

(This is a great in-theory argument that simply does not mesh well with our law in reality)

Personally, I do think it should be legal to decrypt them.

Same. Little did parent commentator know, there are plenty of radical "all information should be free" thinkers in these parts.

If the broadcasted stream is encrypted, and the key is not public, it is obviously not public data.

If the stream is unencrypted, the reasoning applies perfectly.

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