"it can be scraped/crawled, that is, it isn’t LinkedIn property"
I thought it was pretty established that putting something on a website didn't eliminate your copyright. Has that changed now?
To me, it seems like common sense would be that if you make a public website, you are implicitly permitting some copies, but surely it's not all or nothing?
Facts and tables are not copyrightable. The phone numbers in a phone book are not copyrightable, merely their presentation order[0]. If you were to copy, say, the linkedin website, or the linkedin branding, or the name linkedin, or any of their ads, those would be eligible, but the simple collection of names, emails, and phone numbers is ineligible for copyright.
This depends on jurisdiction though. In the European Union specifically there exists sui generis legislation that grants certain rights to the assembler of a database [1]. However, it’s a more interesting situation when the database keeper just provides a means for individuals to fill in their own data.
> I thought it was pretty established that putting something on a website didn't eliminate your copyright. Has that changed now?
No, if anything, that supports the decision.
To the extent that the material is copyrightable, it belongs to the users, who have chosen to make it public; copying incidental and necessary to that access is allowed under an implied license doctrine. Microsoft's efforts to restrict access had nothing to do with copyright, but ToS.
Perhaps it depends on intent. Clearly, the creators of the content, and those who posted the content, did so for the sole intention of making it public and usable outside the LinkedIn system. Their posting of it on LinkedIn is incidental; what site is used or who owns it is largely irrelevant to them, whereas such things clearly do matter to any company or person creating and posting their own unique content to their own site.
At one point, to fight scraping, Craigslist changed their terms so that users assigned them copyright of listings rather than just a license. It didn't work well for them, but it's an interesting approach.
I thought it was pretty established that putting something on a website didn't eliminate your copyright. Has that changed now?
To me, it seems like common sense would be that if you make a public website, you are implicitly permitting some copies, but surely it's not all or nothing?