[yesimahuman]

I have also built for the LinkedIn API. The TOS is very unnerving and I personally wouldn't build any kind of business on it. LinkedIn has a lot of good data but they own it, and developers have to come to terms with that. I think LinkedIn rests on a gold mine of business intelligence data that they are using much too lightly.

[phlux]

This is probably exactly why they act the way they do: they know the data is a goldmine and they want to protect that resource. Create a very narrow TOS and await ideas from the developer community such that they get a good idea of what to build on that data in the future.