Alternative Data News and Insight

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals' April 18th, 2022 opinion was very favorable for webscraping companies and their clients.

Over the past 12 months, we have been observing increased interest from our clients for alternative data solutions and service providers – namely, web scraping services, NLP tools, backtesting and signal detecting services, and portfolio analytics platforms.

Lower US courts are weighing in on web scraping issues in the absence of official guidance from the Supreme Court.

We constantly hear concerns related to scraping. Many of these concerns are still expressed at a high level, indicating broad uncertainty even in the face of the hiQ Labs, Inc. v. LinkedIn Corporation decision.

Whether you call it web scraping, web crawling or spidering, programmatic data access and extraction belongs to the realm of technologies that have outpaced developments within the world of legislation. In the following piece, we provide an introduction to legal theories and concepts that have proven relevant to web scraping activities, as well as some widely accepted guidelines for good bot behaviour.

In 2022, the outcomes of several high-profile legal battles involving website operators and web-scrapers set differing precedents on either side of the Atlantic. In this report, we look closer at some of the cases and what they mean for the legality of web-scraping.