• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, Yesterday

The long list of content scraping lawsuits just got longer.

LinkedIn Corp. has filed suit against ProAPIs Inc., Netswift (SMC-Private) Ltd. and ProAPIs founder Rehmat Alam, accusing them of facilitating the scraping of LinkedIn data. 

The complaint alleges that the defendants “operate a vast network of continuously-created fake accounts — numbering in the millions — that they use to log into LinkedIn and scrape LinkedIn member, company, and school data, as well as member posts, reactions, and comments.”

The complaint continues that the defendants “rent out their scraping services to customers who pay up to $15,000 per month to scrape LinkedIn,” LinkedIn alleges in its complaint. “Defendants’ industrial-scale fake account mill scrapes member information that real people have posted on LinkedIn, including data that is only available behind LinkedIn’s password wall and that Defendants’ customers may not otherwise be allowed to access, and certainly are not allowed to copy and keep in perpetuity."

This is done “at little or no cost to Defendants,” the suit asserts. They did not have to ”make the substantial investment in time, labor, skill, and financial resources made by LinkedIn in developing the LinkedIn website and platform. In other words, Defendants have reaped what they have not sown," it adds.  

However, the defendants “freely acknowledge that they offer 'real-time, detailed data for individual and company LinkedIn profiles' that is 'comprehensive' and 'up-to-the-second,'” the complaint adds.

LinkedIn’s user agreement prohibits data "scraping," the accessing, extraction, and copying of data by automated bots.

The case is on file with the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.