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What cracks me up about this is how these massive companies go to such lengths to call themselves mere platforms in order to avoid liability for content, and then when someone actually takes the content in this case they cry, "Foul! That's ours!" Can't have it both ways.


Linkedin tried to argue that if they put data behind a login wall, then it no longer falls under the wide umbrella of "public data" and so it's "theirs". Previous cases already established that if a crawler can see the data without any session cookies then its okay. This ruling extended that to any data that can reasonably be accessed by any member of the public.

There will probably be more cases like this as the upper bound of what "public data" means; At what point does publicly aggregated data stop being public data? And do attempts that companies make to prevent that data from being captured (ip limiting, captchas, login walls) count as immoral/illegal, since they are restricting the public from accessing a public good?


> Previous cases already established that if a crawler can see the data without any session cookies then its okay.

I'm interested in this, but I'm not sure how to learn more - can you give me a hint?


Do you mean crawling without cookies or the legal case?


What's scarier is when they editorialize their platforms (also read censorship), therefore becoming content producers themselves. Today it's whoever you disagree with being censored, tomorrow it's your own voice.


Who's responsible for privacy then? That's another situation where you can't have it both ways - can't tell the platform they don't own the data and simultaneously hold them to GDPR.




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