Supreme Court Skips Review of Trade Secret Web-Scraping Case

The US Supreme Court won’t take up the question of whether web-scraping publicly available information qualifies as hacking under federal trade secrets law.

Website operator Binyomin Rutstein argued in the high court petition that the Defend Trade Secrets Act exempts “lawful means of acquisition” from its definition of “improper means.” A decision by the US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit likened scraping data to hacking, the petition said, and finding the act constitutes improper means sacrifices a bright-line rule that acquiring public data isn’t unlawful.

“The question is whether an action that is not unlawful” under the DTSA ...