[dawidloubser]

Actually, it's not. In your analogy, the storefront is completely passive and unaffected.

What is actually happening, is that somebody is walking into the store, asks a question about the stock or the price of the products on sale, which the store employee willingly answers.

Then, all of the sudden, the store wishes to control what you do with the answer that was willingly given to you.

This is clearly absurd - and so too is wanting to control what people do with publically-available HTTP data. If it's public, it's public.

I personally do feel that LinkedIn is within their full rights to attempt to detect and restrict content being served to screen-scraping agents, but they must then accept that screen-scraping agents must be allowed to use any means necessary to impersonate a "normal" user browsing the (public) information that they publish.

This can't be a one-sided freedom.

[rayiner]

No that's not what's happening. What was happening is that the store clerk was noticing that an employee from a competitor was coming in and asking questions about the price, and then refused to answer the questions. The judge ordered LinkedIn to respond to the competitors HTTP requests.

[kevin_thibedeau]

Where do you draw the line between this and a DoS flood of HTTP requests? At some point a provider has to be able to rate limit requests to maintain service for legitimate users.

[rayiner]

I don't. I think owners of web servers should be able to selectively choose to respond to requests however they please (so long as they don't violate any e.g. civil rights laws).