Kieran McCarthy writes:
Those interested in web scraping legal issues had high hopes that the Supreme Court’s opinion in Van Buren v. United States last summer would provide clear guidelines on which types of online data access were permissible and which were not.
And while most would agree that the Supreme Court avoided a worst-case scenario with its decision, it didn’t give us what many were hoping for. Van Buren gave us quite the soliloquy on the contextual construction of the word “so” in the drafting of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. And it told us that “liability under both clauses [of the CFAA] stems from a gates-up-or-down inquiry—one either can or cannot access a computer system, and one either can or cannot access certain areas within the system.” But it did not define what a gate was, and the Court went out of its way, in two confusing footnotes, footnotes 8 and 9, to avoid any real guidelines about the types of barriers and protocols give that rise to liability under the CFAA.
Read more at Technology & Marketing Law Blog.