inkedIn decided to sue 100 individuals for using bots collecting user profiles.
Tonia Ouellette Klausner, a partner with Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, and a member of their Internet Law and Strategy Group, explained how buyside firms are using web crawling software and how legal risks could be mitigated.
Automated crawling of websites (also often referred to as “scraping” or “web-harvesting”) is ubiquitous. Internet search engines use “web crawler” programs (sometimes called “bots” or “spiders”) to automatically copy third-party websites in order to help people easily find sites of interest.
This document highlights issues such as copyright infringement, breach of contract, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, trespass to chattels, and ‘Hot news’ misappropriation have to be considered when undertaking data crawling operations.
