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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

> I fully support this decision. If you're offering a service that is public, with the intent to your users that such information will be available publicly, you cannot then police what users of that data you consider to be "public" because it serves your business interest.

Obviously LinkedIn can't control the information itself. But this case isn't about the information in the abstract. It's about an HTTP request to a piece of private property, and how LinkedIn programs that private property to respond to an HTTP request. It's well-accepted that owners of private property can make it available to the general public, with whatever restrictions they please. There is no good reason to treat web servers differently than store fronts. LinkedIn should be able to control who accesses their web servers and how.

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And they do control access.

When you type in a url a request is made and the server responds. Linkedin controls that response and can send back whatever it likes.

McDonalds can control who they sell a burger to but if I want to give my burger to a homeless man outside they shouldn't be allowed to stop me. In this case it's worse the place will tell me the price of a burger but won't allow me to tell the anyone else.

Once the information is public it has entered the public domain

Linkedin controls that response and can send back whatever it likes.

That's exactly what this injunction prohitibts them from doing: "To the extent LinkedIn has already put in place technology to prevent hiQ from accessing these public profiles, it is ordered to remove any such barriers"

Which is why this is an anti-trust case.

LinkedIn have freely provided public data to any competitor but hiQ. If they were preventing any company from taking the data, say by putting it behind a user login with licensing, it would likely not be under consideration.

There're limitations to this. For example, you can take a look of other people's property from publicly accessible place.

Yes, but they are free to build walls, gates, and windows.

Building a wall is akin to limiting the site only to registered users. They don't do this because they want google to index them, but it indexes only publicly available sites.

I.e. that's ok to build a wall, but it's not ok not to build the wall but sue some people among the ones who take a look at the house.

LinkedIn is the one being sued, not the one suing.

Sure, you can do things that don't constitute trespass. But unlike what's inside a store front, you can't observe the contents of a web server without interacting with it (trespassing).

This seems really annoyingly tied to the technology of the web. If the public, non-authenticated web was built on a broadcast mechanism (like radio) instead of a request-response mechanism like HTTP, then this argument wouldn't apply. Hopefully the court considers whether it actually behaves more like the former than the latter.

Even with request-response, I don't see how this would be to LinkedIn's benefit. Their server receives the request, and sends the response. If they don't want it to send the response, they can change it accordingly. If they send the response as usual, how could the request be trespassing?

But they aren't sending the response as usual. That's why HiQ sued them, and what the court said they must do: "To the extent LinkedIn has already put in place technology to prevent hiQ from accessing these public profiles, it is ordered to remove any such barriers"

If the public web was broadcast at a range of radio frequencies the result would indeed be different. But it isn't. In my view, law should be tied to reality.

The web isn't an abstraction, it's a network of privately owned servers responding to requests. This order tells a company that they can't program their servers to look at who is making the request and refuse to respond on that basis.

> unlike what's inside a store front, you can't observe the contents of a web server without interacting with it (trespassing).

Then what do you consider the storefront, or public facing data of a website? Just the whois info on the domain?

The general public can't observe the locked contents of a server without hacking it. Hacking is trespassing.

I would modify your analogy to say the store front is public facing, just like some of the LI data is public facing. There is other LI data that is not public facing.

In my opinion, websites have a larger storefront, as well as multiple levels of access to internal data.

Making HTTP requests is the same thing as having rays of light reflect off the storefront, I'd say.

Actually, it's not. In your analogy, the storefront is completely passive and unaffected.

What is actually happening, is that somebody is walking into the store, asks a question about the stock or the price of the products on sale, which the store employee willingly answers.

Then, all of the sudden, the store wishes to control what you do with the answer that was willingly given to you.

This is clearly absurd - and so too is wanting to control what people do with publically-available HTTP data. If it's public, it's public.

I personally do feel that LinkedIn is within their full rights to attempt to detect and restrict content being served to screen-scraping agents, but they must then accept that screen-scraping agents must be allowed to use any means necessary to impersonate a "normal" user browsing the (public) information that they publish.

This can't be a one-sided freedom.

No that's not what's happening. What was happening is that the store clerk was noticing that an employee from a competitor was coming in and asking questions about the price, and then refused to answer the questions. The judge ordered LinkedIn to respond to the competitors HTTP requests.

Where do you draw the line between this and a DoS flood of HTTP requests? At some point a provider has to be able to rate limit requests to maintain service for legitimate users.

I don't. I think owners of web servers should be able to selectively choose to respond to requests however they please (so long as they don't violate any e.g. civil rights laws).

> There is no good reason to treat web servers differently than store fronts. LinkedIn should be able to control who accesses their web servers and how.

These two statements do not agree with each other. An owner of a brick-and-mortar shop can't (legally) stand out the front and bar black people from entering, for example.

I believe that store can stop you from coming inside and photographing all the displays.

I don't think they can stop you from photographing through the window.

It's an interesting case.

In this case you go in and request the price and they tell you.

They can't stop you from sharing the price its public now.

We are just gonna beat this analogy to death, aren't we?

No, they didn't tell HiQ. In fact, HiQ is suing LinkedIn because LinkedIn refuse to tell them.

No, they did tell then stopped on 5th product.

LIN gives this information (product price) for first few questions, then if you ask about 5th price they say: 403, no more for you. WHILE IF at the same moment, different person (or you in proxy-ip-disguise) comes and asks for 5th product price, LIN happily (and publicly) gives this information.

And if the person comes wearing googlebot tshirt, LIN drops to knees and give a ..... full-db-dump-job ;) Bing/Baidu thsirts also fit. Source: www.linkedin.com/robots.txt

HiQ simply says: that's unfair you can't decide who is good and whois bad. Effectively LIN bans any google competitor (documented case).

No, but they can stand outside and bar pretty much everyone else from entering. Race or national origin discrimination is a very narrow exception to that.

No but they can define terms of entry that apply equally to everyone.

E.g. you may enter and look around. You may not take notes, pictures, or otherwise record what is here.

But this case is about (using your analogy) someone standing on the street, photographing your building. You can't tell them they can't do it. If you don't want them knowing your apples are $1.25/lb then you need to remove that sign from your shop window.

They don't have to apply equally. They just can't discriminate against a protected class. I can put up a "no hispters" sign on my restaurant and enforce it.

But they can bar lots of people for other reasons. Block short people, people with black hair, people wearing red. It gets a bit murky when they block people for something that is related to a protected class but not directly because of a protected class. For example blocking anyone wearing a cross because they block everyone wearing torture devices from entering.

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