From the article, the LinkedIn decision was that scraping data does not violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Violating that act was considered to be criminal activity. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act)
But the claim of a violation was only a claim as part of a civil trial. The law has both civil and criminal elements to it, and this is about the tort part of the law.
LinkedIn made threats accusing hiq of criminal behavior, but that doesn't mean there's any criminal precedent being set here, as far as I can tell. And no one was criminally charged.
Separately, part of the ruling states that for the purposes of authorization, defying a cease and desist letter does not constitute illegal access, which might have some criminal implications. They imply some sort of technical authorization system must be bypassed, which didn't happen, since the data is "public."
(Which doesn't square well, imho, with existing meatspace law. If a public serving business banned someone from their store, the door being unlocked isn't an excuse to ignore that ban and trespass. But I digress.)
With the overlapping areas of law, it's admittedly beyond my understanding. But the law is generally viewed, like dmca, as being overreaching, if not at least partly unconstitutional.
The CFAA is overreaching, and used often as a catch all. 'Reply All' has a good episode which explores this. This is actually what was used against Aaron Swartz when he was charged for downloading academic journals from MIT, and why his charges were unjustly severe.