<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>eagsalazar2</author><text>Not sure &amp;quot;isn&amp;#x27;t LinkedIn property&amp;quot; is accurate here.  They still retain ownership and control of redistribution just like any other IP.  This is more of a philosophical question about whether &amp;quot;viewing&amp;quot; itself is a violation of their ownership rights and really about the definitions of &amp;quot;viewing&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;public&amp;quot; in the context of the internet.&lt;p&gt;Seems like they&amp;#x27;ve simply determined that viewing any freely accessible URL is &amp;quot;public&amp;quot; and that &amp;quot;viewing&amp;quot; does include scraping.  This seems like a very reasonable determination as it maps pretty neatly to how we think about viewing public content IRL where I am free to drive down the road (for profit or pleasure) and record publicly viewable signage and activities and use that data any way I see fit.</text><parent_chain><item><author>pixelmonkey</author><text>The summary here is that LinkedIn tried to argue that it could prevent scraping of public LinkedIn profile data under their ToS, but the courts have ruled that if data is public and provided by users, it can be scraped&amp;#x2F;crawled, that is, it isn’t LinkedIn property. This is generally a positive outcome for people&amp;#x2F;companies turning web text and HTML into structured data, e.g. tools like Puppeteer and Scrapy can be used more freely on sites like LinkedIn, Twitter, and Reddit. Now, you might still get into trouble if you re-publish that data, but you can, at least, safely use the data ”internally”, and the act of scraping&amp;#x2F;crawling (politely) is not, per se, something unlawful.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>LinkedIn loses appeal over access to user profiles</title><url>https://www.reuters.com/article/us-microsoft-linkedin-profiles/microsofts-linkedin-loses-appeal-over-access-to-user-profiles-idUSKCN1VU21W</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>lucb1e</author><text>This is about the copyright on the items that people post, i.e. creative works, right? But what if LinkedIn collects facts (where you work, your age, etc.), wouldn&amp;#x27;t that be covered by sui generis property right (better known as database copyright)?&lt;p&gt;Does this judgement say anything about that, i.e. whether it matters that users contributed the &lt;i&gt;facts&lt;/i&gt; in their collection (so I&amp;#x27;m not talking about posts, descriptions, etc.) rather than that they collected it themselves and therefore get a form of property right?&lt;p&gt;Edit: wait, database copyright is not a thing in the USA. Of course they wouldn&amp;#x27;t say anything about that.</text><parent_chain><item><author>pixelmonkey</author><text>The summary here is that LinkedIn tried to argue that it could prevent scraping of public LinkedIn profile data under their ToS, but the courts have ruled that if data is public and provided by users, it can be scraped&amp;#x2F;crawled, that is, it isn’t LinkedIn property. This is generally a positive outcome for people&amp;#x2F;companies turning web text and HTML into structured data, e.g. tools like Puppeteer and Scrapy can be used more freely on sites like LinkedIn, Twitter, and Reddit. Now, you might still get into trouble if you re-publish that data, but you can, at least, safely use the data ”internally”, and the act of scraping&amp;#x2F;crawling (politely) is not, per se, something unlawful.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>LinkedIn loses appeal over access to user profiles</title><url>https://www.reuters.com/article/us-microsoft-linkedin-profiles/microsofts-linkedin-loses-appeal-over-access-to-user-profiles-idUSKCN1VU21W</url></story>