Web Scraping and the Law After Hiq V Linkedin: Where the CFAA Contract and Copyright Collide

80 questions on web scraping and the law after hiq v linkedin, answered and cited by the UpLaw editorial team.

• Are CAPTCHAs "technological protection measures" under Section 1201?
• Are facts protected by copyright?
• Can a cease-and-desist letter revoke authorization under the CFAA?
• Can a database of facts carry any copyright?
• Can a model trained lawfully abroad still face liability at home?
• Can I scrape data behind a login if I create an account to get in?
• Can misappropriation be used to get around Feist?
• Did Van Buren technically decide whether scraping public sites violates the CFAA?
• Does the CFAA's $5,000 loss threshold protect scrapers?
• Does the drafting of a cease-and-desist letter matter?
• Does violating a website's terms of service make scraping a federal crime?
• How did Intel v. Hamidi limit trespass to chattels?
• How did Meta draft itself out of protection?
• How did the hiQ litigation end?
• How did Warhol v. Goldsmith complicate the transformativeness story?
• How does Japan treat copying for information analysis?
• How does the EU treat text and data mining?
• How does the fact/expression line run through a single website?
• How does the first fair-use factor apply to training on user reviews?
• How do the three doctrines stack on a single scraping decision?
• How is the AI-training licensing market changing the fair-use calculus?
• How large was the Bartz v. Anthropic settlement?
• How should an operator draft terms of service to bind scrapers?
• How should an operator match its legal tool to a scraper's conduct?
• If hiQ won the CFAA question, why did it lose the case?
• Is web scraping legal?
• What are the core rules that keep a data collector at the low-risk end?
• What are the four fair-use factors?
• What are the statutory damages for DMCA circumvention?
• What byproduct does a layered defense generate?
• What copyright rights does AI training implicate?
• What did Feist do to the "sweat of the brow" theory?
• What did Kadrey v. Meta hold?
• What did Meta v. Bright Data decide?
• What did Nguyen v. Barnes & Noble hold about browsewrap?
• What did the Ninth Circuit hold in hiQ v. LinkedIn?
• What did Thomson Reuters v. ROSS Intelligence decide?
• What did Van Buren v. United States decide?
• What did X Corp. v. Bright Data hold?
• What distinction did Bartz v. Anthropic draw?
• What does copyright registration do for a website operator, and what are its limits?
• What does DMCA Section 1201 prohibit?
• What does "exceeds authorized access" mean, and why was it contested?
• What happened to hiQ after Van Buren?
• What is a "protected computer" under the CFAA?
• What is at stake in Andersen v. Stability AI?
• What is the CFAA statute of limitations?
• What is the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and who was it written for?
• What is the difference between clickwrap and browsewrap?
• What is the emerging consensus from the Bright Data rulings?
• What is the "gates-up-or-down" rule?
• What is the hot news misappropriation doctrine?
• What is the mirror-image advice for collectors and operators on assent?
• What is the most effective single protection for a website operator?
• What is the most important single factor in scraping risk?
• What is the pre-AI transformativeness lineage AI developers rely on?
• What is the real lesson of hiQ v. LinkedIn?
• What is the safest scraping posture?
• What is the throughline across Bartz, Kadrey, and ROSS?
• What is transformativeness and why does it matter?
• What is trespass to chattels in the scraping context?
• What kinds of scraping sit on comfortable copyright ground?
• What legal weight does robots.txt carry?
• What might legislation do to scraping and training rules?
• What three bodies of law fire at once when someone scrapes a website?
• What was the hiQ v. LinkedIn dispute about?
• What were the stakes of the CFAA circuit split for the open web?
• Where does web-scraping law stand overall?
• Which technical barriers are the real gates?
• Why did scraping stop being a boutique legal concern?
• Why did the nature of Westlaw headnotes matter in the ROSS case?
• Why has robots.txt become a front line of the AI licensing fight?
• Why is rate limiting both a collector's defense and an operator's evidence?
• Why is the fourth fair-use factor often decisive in AI cases?
• Why is the third fair-use factor double-edged in AI cases?
• Why is web scraping so legally treacherous when the act itself is so simple?
• Why may the New York Times case be more dangerous to AI defendants than the book cases?
• Why might Kadrey be a roadmap for future plaintiffs?
• Why must website defenses be layered?
• Why should an operator monitor for scraping?