> Sometimes such “forced” interoperability is illegal, sometimes it's the opposite and the a regulator or legislator recognizes it as an important public good, and very often (such as here) there is no precedent and we know absolutely nothing about the legality. We can have our educated guesses, but that's it.
You say this as if all these cases have the same fact pattern and it’s just a roll of the dice.
But that’s not true and in fact there is very clear precedent that matches the facts of the case at hand.
Quicken and other scrapers are generally allowed, especially, but exclusively, when it pertains publicly accessible data.
Those kinds of cases have been tried with the main argument being the exceeding of authorization under the CFAA and copyright violations.
Courts have consistently decided that scraping doesn’t rise to the levels of computer trespass in the form of exceeding the authorization given to access the computer system and that it’s not copyright violation primarily because, to put it simply, it doesn’t exceed the authorization enough and because there’s a fair use component to it.
The most recent case law on this, which happens to involve publicly available data so isn’t fully analogue with Quicken, is hiQ Labs v. LinkedIn[0]
However, there’s also case law on clauses in EULAs and ToSs that prohibit reverse engineering (like in the case of Apple’s EULAs and ToS) that says those clauses are not only enforceable but they supersede the DMCA reverse engineering exception.
In fact the case law is even more relevant for this Beeper debacle, because it also happens to pertain to a company that reverse engineered another companies software, repackaged it to then sell it for a price, like Beeper tried to do with Beeper mini for $2/mo.
That case law is still good standing case law and is Bowers v. Baystate Technologies, Inc.[1]
You say this as if all these cases have the same fact pattern and it’s just a roll of the dice. But that’s not true and in fact there is very clear precedent that matches the facts of the case at hand.
Quicken and other scrapers are generally allowed, especially, but exclusively, when it pertains publicly accessible data.
Those kinds of cases have been tried with the main argument being the exceeding of authorization under the CFAA and copyright violations.
Courts have consistently decided that scraping doesn’t rise to the levels of computer trespass in the form of exceeding the authorization given to access the computer system and that it’s not copyright violation primarily because, to put it simply, it doesn’t exceed the authorization enough and because there’s a fair use component to it.
The most recent case law on this, which happens to involve publicly available data so isn’t fully analogue with Quicken, is hiQ Labs v. LinkedIn[0]
However, there’s also case law on clauses in EULAs and ToSs that prohibit reverse engineering (like in the case of Apple’s EULAs and ToS) that says those clauses are not only enforceable but they supersede the DMCA reverse engineering exception.
In fact the case law is even more relevant for this Beeper debacle, because it also happens to pertain to a company that reverse engineered another companies software, repackaged it to then sell it for a price, like Beeper tried to do with Beeper mini for $2/mo. That case law is still good standing case law and is Bowers v. Baystate Technologies, Inc.[1]
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HiQ_Labs_v._LinkedIn
1: https://law.resource.org/pub/us/case/reporter/F3/320/320.F3d...