In addition, if a company’s agents or contractors violate a site’s terms on a company’s behalf, the company may be held liable for breach of contract. This decision highlights how and when courts may enforce online user agreements and terms of service, including restricting web scraping activities. Moreover, the court found that hiQ expressly agreed to the user agreement when it created its corporate account on LinkedIn’s platform. The district court held that hiQ, under the circumstances present in that case, violated LinkedIn’s user agreement through (1) its automated web scraping of LinkedIn profiles and (2) its hiring of crowdsourced workers (“turkers”) to create fake profiles through which to access LinkedIn’s platform. In November 2022, LinkedIn won its motion for summary judgment on its breach of contract claim. Web Scraping Going Forward Breach of Contract In the end, the case addressed several issues related to breach of contract and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act that may inform future cases involving scraping. Now entered by the court, the stipulation and consent judgment also provides for $500,000 in damages for LinkedIn and a stipulation by hiQ that LinkedIn may establish liability under the CFAA and California’s state-law equivalent-though those stipulations do not serve as precedent because they amount to an agreement between the parties.įor those watching, the case has had a winding path through the courts: beginning with a cease-and-desist letter in 2017, the case was appealed to the Ninth Circuit, remanded by the Supreme Court to the Ninth Circuit, and then finally concluded back in district court. Around December 6, 2022, the parties reached a private settlement, and hiQ agreed to a permanent injunction requiring it to cease web scraping and to delete all source code, data, and algorithms created and obtained in its efforts to scrape LinkedIn in violation of the site’s user agreement. The five-year dispute between hiQ Labs and LinkedIn over web scraping has come to an end.

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