SAN FRANCISCO – A San Francisco tech startup is seeking to enjoin LinkedIn from restricting it from accessing public profile information.
hiQ Labs Inc. filed a complaint on June 7 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California against LinkedIn Corp. seeking declaratory judgment.
According to the complaint, the plaintiff collects and analyzes public profile information on LinkedIn to provide clients with insights about their employees. It alleges LinkedIn denied it access to the public member profile portions of its website citing the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and state penal code. The plaintiff alleges LinkedIn users' public profile data belongs to the users and not the defendant, but the defendant asserts it needs to protect member data.
The plaintiff seeks injunctive relief, declare that the defendant should allow the plaintiff to access and use data from public profiles, damages, all legal fees and any other relief as the court deems just. It is represented by C. Brandon Wisoff, Deepak Gupta, Rebecca H. Stephens and Jeffrey G. Lau of Farella Braun + Martel LLP in San Francisco.
U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California case number 3:17-cv-03301-EMC