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A comment on U.S. judge says LinkedIn cannot block startup from public profile data. Parent comment

Re:U.S. judge says LinkedIn cannot block startup from public... by revelation on Monday August 14, 2017 @06:20PM (#15013547)
There is no grey area. You can not copyright facts. If you download ("scrape") a webpage and then extract the facts, whatever you downloaded only exists in volatile memory. So there is no claim there. The only claim you can make is on the download itself, hence what LinkedIn chose.
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Re:U.S. judge says LinkedIn cannot block startup from public... by onion2k on Monday August 14, 2017 @06:25PM (#15013584)
I've seen plenty of LinkedIn profiles that could be classified as fiction.
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Re:U.S. judge says LinkedIn cannot block startup from public... by wvenable on Monday August 14, 2017 @07:37PM (#15014023)
But LinkedIn isn't the owner of that fiction.
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Re:U.S. judge says LinkedIn cannot block startup from public... by tyingq on Monday August 14, 2017 @06:45PM (#15013712)
It's possible that HiQ is downloading and processing things that aren't facts. Long passages of text in LinkedIn posts, recommendations, and comments aren't "facts".

Though that doesn't appear to be the path LinkedIn is using to fight it.

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Re:U.S. judge says LinkedIn cannot block startup from public... by revelation on Monday August 14, 2017 @06:51PM (#15013740)
Copyright isn't thoughtcrime, if they aren't redistributing it to anyone with standing to sue (very likely not LinkedIn, no matter their ToS) they can process things all day.
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Re:U.S. judge says LinkedIn cannot block startup from public... by tyingq on Monday August 14, 2017 @06:57PM (#15013785)
I did not say or imply "thoughtcrime". Just noting it can be more complex. Sentiment analysis of copyrighted text passages might be claimed as being a derivitive work for example. Fair use does have limits.

The standing to sue is an issue for user generated content, yes.

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Re:U.S. judge says LinkedIn cannot block startup from public... by cvsh on Monday August 14, 2017 @11:05PM (#15015040)
>Sentiment analysis of copyrighted text passages might be claimed as being a derivitive work for example.

So if a company releases a product that predicts likelihood of an employee quitting, you think you're going to have standing to sue because an analysis of a copyrighted passage you wrote comprised 0.000001% of the source material the algorithm was trained on?

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Re:U.S. judge says LinkedIn cannot block startup from public... by tyingq on Monday August 14, 2017 @11:40PM (#15015235)
You left out my last sentence, on purpose I suppose.

The context was that scraping doesn't always get a free pass because "facts". This specific case may skirt it because of the user generated content. Doesn't mean it's not worth mentioning for the larger context that copyright isn't black and white.

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