LinkedIn obtained a permanent injunction on Dec. 6 in its six-year-old lawsuit against data scraping company hiQ Labs, which LinkedIn quickly cheered as a "final, decisive victory" that established an "important legal precedent." While the stipulated injunction does prevent hiQ Labs from scraping LinkedIn's data, the outcome of the lawsuit notably does not affect previous rulings by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in the case against LinkedIn and in favor of companies that wish to scrape (i.e., automatically collect) publicly available data.

In particular, neither the outcome in this case nor a similar recent victory by Meta Platforms against scraper BrandTotal impacts the principle that platforms may not wield the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA, 18 U.S.C. §1030) to prohibit scraping publicly available data from their platforms.