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Comment by ojosilva | Hacker News Reader

Terms of Use are a thing, and if the Times can prove that OpenAI infringed their web terms by scraping, they may have a case... but terms of use probably won't monetize well or give them enough leverage to prevent OpenAI from using their data anyway and may end-up distracting from the main copyright suit.

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Violating TOS, at least to scrape and use later, is legal.[0] I'm not sure how the ruling interacts with LLMs, but I'm sure OpenAI's lawyers would bring it up.

[0]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/zacharysmith/2022/04/18/scrapin...

FYI LinkedIn actually won that case after appealing once more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HiQ_Labs_v._LinkedIn

Ah. I was not aware there was an update to that case. TIL.

Where do you see that they won the case? Can you provide a source because the wikipedia article directly contradicts what you are saying...?

I see they went to the Supreme Court who kicked it back to the Ninth who then re-affirmed their position that HiQ Labs was not in violation of the CFAA.

From [0] and [1], it seems it was a mixed ruling. I am actually not sure whether it's now legal to scrape, since the Court ruled against hiQ due to a breach of terms of service, but previously the Ninth Circuit Court affirmed its ruling against LinkedIn.

[0] https://www.natlawreview.com/article/court-finds-hiq-breache...

[1] https://www.natlawreview.com/article/hiq-and-linkedin-reach-...

> The hiQ decisions give a green light, at least in some circumstances, to scraping publicly available websites without fear of liability under the CFAA.

So at a federal level, it seems relatively clear. The only uncertainty is on the state level.

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