hiQ is a small data analytics company that used automated bots to scrape information from public LinkedIn profiles.
hiQ Labs brought a case against LinkedIn in a district court, seeking an injunction against these means, which was granted.
"[8] The Ninth Circuit held that there was no abuse of discretion by the district court where the court had found that even if some LinkedIn users retained their privacy despite their public status, as they were not scraped, such privacy interests did not outweigh hiQ's interest in maintaining its business.
The Ninth Circuit affirmed the district court's finding that public interest favored the granting of a preliminary injunction.
In his concurring opinion, Judge Wallace specified his concern about the appeal of a preliminary injunction initiated in order to obtain an appellate court's take on the merits.
While there is global precedence by virtue of large companies such as Thomson Reuters, Bloomberg or Google effectively using web-scraping or crawling to aggregate information from disparate sources across the web, fundamentally the judgement by Ninth Circuit fortifies the lack of enforceability of browse-wrap agreements over conduct of trade using publicly available information.