[razwall]

From reading the ruling, the injunction was based on a finding that HiQ raised serious questions about whether LinkedIn blocking HiQ's scrapers constituted a violation of California's unfair competition law by violating the spirit of federal antitrust law.

HiQ argued that LinkedIn has a monopoly on "the professional networking market" and is unfairly exploiting that monopoly to gain an advantage in the data analytics market. HiQ showed that LinkedIn might be developing an analytics product that competes directly with their Skill Mapper product.

[c3534l]

Great. So in a business that makes money primarily by collecting and selling user data, they're now required to give it away for free.

[chalst]

Correction: user-generated data. LI get the content from their users for free.

[vntok]

I dont understand how you came to think that. What about the cost of hosting and serving the html forms (cpu and bandwidth), processing the content update requests, storing the resulting data structures? What about the marketing costs of making the brand known both by individuals and companies? The wages associated to any of the operations i have just mentioned?

What definition of "free" are you using here?

[fastier]

I agree there seems to be a problems with means and investments: if I invest to create a website with valuable data, and anyone can come and scrape my data and start their own or a competing business, riding on top of my investment, isn't that a disincentive to me?