As reported by O'Reilly, via Hacker News, "not only is scraping legal, LinkedIn can't put barriers in the way of HiQ's crawlers." To 'scrape' a website is to use automation to make page requests and extract information (such as names, URLs, or titles) from them. The court's decision (38 page PDF) was wide-ranging and worth reading in full. "The district court granted hiQ's motion. It ordered LinkedIn to withdraw its cease-and-desist letter, to remove any existing technical barriers to hiQ's access to public profiles, and to refrain from putting in place any legal or technical measures with the effect of blocking hiQ's access to public profiles." So, cool. Sometimes Terms of Service aren't the law.
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