> by taking up this case SCOTUS is potentially going in the other direction.
They didn't actually take it up, but sent it back to the 9th for a re-hearing in light of Van Buren v. US. But that ruling seems to make LinkedIn's case even weaker, I too am somewhat confused about what's going on, what options were available to the supreme court and what signal this one sends.
Honestly I missed this subtlety but it does make it even clearer: SCOTUS is asking the Appeals Court to revisit if bots constitute "unauthorized" use (under CFAA).
Van Buren decided that if an authorized user used a computer system for what were effectively policy violations and didn't bypass restrictions on that use then it's not "unauthorized" in the CFAA sense.
Consider a phone book (ie the white pages). It has names of individuals who haven't opted out in alphabetic order. This makes it incredibly easy to find a mapping of name -> phone number (in O(log n) technically). You could do a lookup of phone number -> name but its inefficient (O(n)) and the volume of names is so large that it's not feasible for a person to do it.
There are good reasons to prevent this reverse mapping, privacy among them.
Now imagine that phone book is online. Obviously someone could scrape this data and built that reverse index. So the website provider does things like rate-limit your queries, occasionally CAPTCHA you (FWIW) and so on.
If the LinkedIn decision stands, such impediments may be blocked by courts. That's probably not a good outcome.
Additionally, doing that lookup yourself is infeasible but totally feasible with a bunch of automated lookalikes (ie bots).
So I would say SCOTUS is hinting that the Appeals Court ruling is too broad and some limits on website access can apply.
> If the LinkedIn decision stands, such impediments may be blocked by courts. That's probably not a good outcome.
Nope, I think you have it totally incorrect. The issue isn't whether it can be illegal to put technology impediments in place -- that isn't a claim in this case.
The issue is potentially whether you can charge someone with a felony for working around the impediments you put in place. (i'm not totally sure if that is relevant in this case?) Or even more so, if you can charge someone with a felony for hacking for just doing something you politely asked them not to do.
But there is nothing at stake here that could possibly make it illegal to put technological impediments like rate-limiting or CAPTCHA's in place. If I'm wrong, please direct me to the details of where/why. But that was definitely not at stake in Van Buren v. US, which is what the Supreme Court says prompted the remit for a re-hearing. The CFAA is about a felony crime of unauthorized access; nothing in it, decided either way, can make it a crime (or "blocked by courts") to put technological impediments in place.
But overall, OP article is doing a very poor job of explaining either the facts or law of this case, so there's a lot I'm not sure about from just this write-up and what else I've been able to lazily google alone.
If anyone has a better article explaining the relevant facts and law in dispute here, I'm still interested.
They didn't actually take it up, but sent it back to the 9th for a re-hearing in light of Van Buren v. US. But that ruling seems to make LinkedIn's case even weaker, I too am somewhat confused about what's going on, what options were available to the supreme court and what signal this one sends.
Anyone have a better article?