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Comment by vacri | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

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).

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

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.

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.

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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