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Comment by johnny99 | Hacker News Reader

Facts can't be copyrighted, so such things as whether or not a person worked for a certain company, or went to a certain school, are unprotected, and with this ruling can be scraped, at least in the U.S. Others things common on LinkedIn, as you rightly point out, are protected--but by copyright law, not the CFAA. So a scraper acting in good faith would have to be careful about what they used if they wanted to respect copyright, but it's a separate issue from this ruling.

http://www.dmlp.org/legal-guide/works-not-covered-copyright

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This is exactly right. Copyright protects creative expression, not pure fact. Famously, phone books (remember those?) are basically not copyrightable except for the ads, because they're just lists of data. Feist Publications, Inc., v. Rural Telephone Service Co., 499 U.S. 340 (1991).

I never said that fact can be copyrighted, I said that most of the things people put around in their profile can be. I was responding to the claim that the data were not under copyright made above. If you just scrap name, company, position, this is fine, but I highly doubt that they just do that. This lawsuit can have tons of side effects.

I think what hiQ does is to predict whether a particular employee is about to quit.

So the interesting question to me is whether you can lawfully make predictions based on published information if that information is under copyright.

In Europe the answer is probably no, because the assumption is that in order to analyse data you have to copy it first.

To me, this interpretation of the term "copying" makes very little sense. So I wonder what US law makes of it.

Europe has database rights, which has a fair dealing exemption for data analysis.

I'm not sure what "database rights" refers to specifically, but the whole matter is actually rather complicated, because the EU copyright directive has a lot of optional exceptions that member states may or may not adopt.

Most of these exceptions only apply to non-commercial use though. So they wouldn't apply in a case like hiQ.

UK specific exceptions are explained here:

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/exceptions-to-copyright

Unfortunately, both Labour and the Tories have taken a relatively hard line in the EU copyright negotiations, so it seems unlikely that things will be relaxed very much after Brexit.

Database rights are a copyright-like intellectual property regime for databases.

"Facts can't be copyrighted, so such things as whether or not a person worked for a certain company, or went to a certain school, are unprotected"

There's an infinite number of ways to describe a job history, without any single standard, so I don't think it makes any sense to say that a profile or resume is not copyrightable.

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